


The Quiet Ones

by twistedservice



Series: The Fabled [7]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Blood and Injury, F/F, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Multi, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Near Death Experiences, Supernatural Elements, [oh yeah it's all coming together], the almost-verge into high fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-24 20:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 32,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22003771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedservice/pseuds/twistedservice
Summary: There are always things happening everywhere, all at once, alongside each other. Things that people are never aware of, for the better or worse.So what's the answer, then? Better, or worse?Someone is about to find out.
Series: The Fabled [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1072044
Kudos: 2





	1. One Of Us Is Lying

In the state of elsewhere.  
April 11th, 10:58pm.

Nadir has become more familiar with the word plan that she would have liked to be.

It’s always plan this, plan that. We need a plan just in case, which is always, and it needs to be a good one.

Luckily for them, they’ve had five months to plan this one. Five months in the grand scheme of her entire situation isn’t nearly enough; almost perfectly cut in half, in fact. But it’s more than enough to figure out what they’re going to do once they realize just what’s happening.

Then again, she’s not even sure she knows what’s happening to this day, beyond a whole collective of fucked up things and ruined timelines. Shirin’s been helpful has ever; he doesn’t seem to know whether he possibly fucked up the time, somehow, during the whole resurrection deal, or if this is just supposed to happen.

Somehow Nadir doesn’t think a baby is supposed to happen in five months, but who is she to say that? If there’s ever been something like this born in the entirety of history, she’d be pretty shocked. Beyond shocked.

Something has settled in her, though. She knows beyond reason of a doubt that it’s happening and it’s happening any time now. It’s not just a gut feeling. She’s having a lot of gut feelings lately.

Ideally getting confirmation from Shirin would be nice, but she doesn’t think she’s going to get it sometime in the next few hours.

Like she said - helpful.

“You sure you don’t want me to come?” Tanis asks, sitting next to her on the stairs. No one is letting her fucking do anything; she’s become an invalid, even when it comes to picking up a bag. God forbid she carry something.

“No. I want you to go visit your parents.”

“But I could—”

“You haven’t seen them in almost two months. It’ll be good for you. Besides, what are you going to do? Come in the room and help me?”

“Gross,” Tanis mutters. That’s about what Nadir thought she’d get for a response. If Tanis even likes the kid once it’s here it’ll be a miracle, frankly. There’s no way she’s going to like anything about it before then.

“Hold this,” Dimara interrupts. She dips herself over the stair railing to pass a sheet of paper to Nadir, the hastily scrawled list of hospitals from here all the way up to Presque Isle. If she’s being honest, they’re not going to get anywhere near that far. The goal is to just not be here, in case. In case of what, she doesn’t know.

But hey, at least she’s holding something.

Tanis leans over her shoulder to look at it. “You’ll call me?”

“Blair will call you. I’ll be wishing death on him and everyone else present.”

“Blair will be having a meltdown,” Tanis points out. “Dimara, make sure you call me!”

It’s shouted out the door, and Dimara waves vaguely behind her but doesn’t seem as if she really absorbed it.

“I’ll call you,” Kali says. Nadir had almost forgotten she was here - she’s been deathly quiet, for the past hour or so. It seems like with every passing month that she’s been getting bolder with the whole lot of them, though.

Nadir’s still not entirely sure why she’s coming. Sure, there’s the whole side quest of talking to Shirin involved at the beginning, but after that?

Maybe Kali just really likes babies. They’ll all see if that stands once it’s here and, as Blair calls it, a monster.

She’s really hoping that’s not the case.

The car finally finishes being loaded up. It looks a little excessive. Nadir doesn’t think they’ll be gone for more than a few days with how she feels. Everyone looks to be taking the it never hurts to overpack motto a little too seriously.

“If you want us to drive you, up here, now!” Dimara shouts down the stairs, and Vance nearly catapults himself up them in his haste to get past her and out the door. Chances are she really wouldn’t leave him, but there’s no risking that. It’s just the uneasiness that’s getting to everyone; the last time they all split up like this they all know what happened, and none of it was good.

They’ll all come back together in a few days. This, at least, is for the best. Tanis should have nothing to worry about at her parents, and this house and its contents should theoretically be protected from the outside.

They’re going far enough away that they shouldn’t have to worry at all; that’s the point.

“Be safe,” she says, before Tanis leans in to hug her. “Call me when you get there and I’ll make sure someone calls you.”

“Deal. Teach it to love me before you get back here.”

“Try my best,” she offers. Tanis squeezes and then releases her for the last time in at least a few days, sitting back against the stairs.

Kelsea’s already hugged her, hard, and over the course of several hours. They’ve all been broken up into shorter moments. Rory managed to break in long enough himself to get one too, and so did Celia.

So that’s everyone, really.

She has a lot of… work to do, really, over the next few days. And then, if Kali continues lingering, there will be eleven of them. Not ten, but even more. She’s convinced of that number because she won’t allow herself to be otherwise.

Clearson has been AWOL for a while, now. Either he’s laying low or he’s disappeared off the radar entirely. People have still been seeing things around town, too often to be coincidence, but nothing of alarm has happened. That doesn’t mean she’s stupid enough to believe nothing will - she’s just hoping it will wait a few days, if that’s the case.

He’s still out there. Maybe he knows they’ve figured it out and they’ve been working against him ever since.

Chances are he’s just coming up with a plan of his own. Five months is a lot of time.

But they survived the winter. That was step one. Sure, they may have locked themselves almost exclusively inside this house, beyond the barrier to the outside world, but they’re still alive.

And they’re still doing this.

“You ready to go?” Blair asks. He takes Tanis’ place on the stairs, looming above her, and offers a hand to help her to her feet.

She eyes it, and then thinks better of not taking it to prove a point. “Are you?”

“No,” he replies immediately, pulling her up. “But do I have a choice?”

Neither of them do. They made a choice five months ago to go through with this and there’s no backing out of it now; it’s happening whether they’re ready or not.

“Sure don’t,” she answers. “But we’ll figure it out.”

He nods. Smiles, even. For once he doesn’t look like he wants to be sick at the prospect of it. She’s sure that will come back with time, when it’s two seconds from happening for real, but at least then they’ll both feel that way.

And they will figure it out. She has no doubt whatsoever.

Blair squeezes her hand. “Now or never.”

It’s now, finally. There’s no never about it.

There’s no going back from this.

—

—

—

“Hey,” Dimara snaps, insistent. She grabs the back of his jacket to stop him before he can duck out of the car. “You don’t go anywhere without each other. Understand?”

“Understood,” Vance clarifies. He feels an awful lot like a soldier, marching around and following orders.

At least this one he understands.

She grabs Rooke too just before he slips out of the car after him, repeating similar words. It’s going to be undoubtedly more difficult to contain someone like Rooke than someone like him. Even more difficult when there’s no one around to do the containing.

Farren doesn’t have the practice. If she did he reckons she would be good at it.

Not much is said besides that; goodbye’s have been discussed and performed long before this moment. He doesn’t even find himself lingering on the curb for too long, staring after the fast-disappearing car until Rooke nudges him.

“Do you think she’s going to like me?” he asks. Vance doesn’t miss the ways his eyes jump around their surroundings, investigating every little nook and cranny.

He urges him towards the building’s front door. No point in lingering on the street. “By default I think she likes everyone until they prove they don’t deserve it.”

“And she knows I’m—”

“She does.”

“She’s not weirded out?”

“You’re dead, not some giant rage monster that goes positively apeshit once a month every full moon.”

“You don’t go apeshit.”

“Anymore,” he emphasizes. It’s nice not to. To have a handle on things for once in his life, at least in the past year or so, is overwhelmingly nice. For once different isn’t so bad.

If that involves coming here every once in a while, he’ll allow it. He doesn’t come here often, per say. A handful of times in the past few months ever since he made Blair pick him up that first time, but enough. Once she texted him back it snowballed from there, and then she never really left him alone, but he didn’t either. It was difficult to separate himself from her when he had Casper living in his head, invisible in the air around him.

And it got worse, truly, with every passing month. He could hear him more clearly, some days, like he was standing face to face with him. Casper could knock things over nearly on command if he asked him to.

“You’re really going to tell her?” Rooke asks. Sometimes he wonders if he has more than one person in his head.

“It’s getting to the point where I don’t have much of a choice.”

“You’re definitely telling her,” Casper agrees, no stride broken.

“But you still can’t see him, right?” Rooke asks.

“Tell him to fucking rub it in, why doesn’t he?” Casper says flatly. “Seriously, tell him that.”

It’s different now. Once he figured it out, to a degree, he told Rooke. And then Kelsea. After that, for some strange and equally stupid reason, he told everyone. Like Blair, though, they all believed him. Perhaps it stretched the imagination of some, but they got there in the end.

All it comes down to is if Farren will believe him or not.

Farren and his brother both, really. Since Declan came back just like Farren hoped he would in early March, it's been even more odd to be immersed in it. The few times Vance has been here since he hasn’t been around, much. They’ve hardly talked.

Vance went through the grieving process, too, but what doesn’t change is that Dimara’s not blood and that he hadn’t known her his entire life. It still hurt like hell, like nothing ever will again, but it’s different.

And he’s really, really going to fuck all of that up by telling them that Casper is still around.

“Tell him,” Casper repeats.

“He’s mad that you’re rubbing it in that I can see you and not him.”

“That’s not at all what I said,” Casper says flatly.

“To be fair, I didn’t learn how to be corporeal for decades. And it took me years to even move something,” Rooke reminds him. Having him here so solidly now makes that idea all the more weird. To think of a time when Rooke wasn’t really here at all… he doesn’t like it.

“I know what he’s thinking,” Rooke continues. “Really, I do. But I think you tethering him here and… connecting him to something, I guess, is really helping. For all we know it’s just a matter of time.”

“Until what?”

“Until something happens that makes him snap back into form.”

Wouldn’t that just be lovely? He wouldn’t have to have a painfully awkward, awful conversation with anyone about Casper still lingering around - he would just be here.

Vance pauses in front of the apartment door. It does feel awkward; there may be a better way to describe the feeling, but he has yet to come up with it.

“You’re not doing it right away, are you?”

“No,” he assures Rooke. “Later. I’ll at least let you meet her first.”

Rooke looks nervous too. Besides them and Kali, who has Rooke really met and properly stuck to in the past few decades? Parker? Does he even count?

Vance isn’t sure.

“I know you haven’t wanted to leave the house,” Vance says. “All this shit going on, I don’t blame you. And I’m not gonna pretend it’s safe for us to be out here - so thank you. For coming with me to do this.”

“You said you needed back-up.”

“Someone else would have come with me; you’re the only one that offered. And you didn’t have to.”

“Yeah, I did,” Rooke murmurs.

“Past experience, and all that,” Casper interrupts. “Are me and him going to be best friends?”

“No,” he says quickly. Rooke shoots him a bemused look - something about his tone has clearly come across differently. Now that Rooke’s spent enough time knowing what’s going on it’s clear who he’s talking to here. It’s abundantly clear.

Rooke, for all the faults and misconstructions of being permanently ghostly and very much dead, is largely unchanged in the best respects. Given what’s happened to him, it feels like a miracle.

Casper, who’s taken to outright driving him insane the past five months, seems to get worse everyday.

Vance would like Rooke to remain the way he is, thank you very much.

“That’s rude,” Casper informs him.

“You’re rude,” Vance replies. From keeping him up all hours of the night to trashing his room when Vance isn’t around, even going so far as to poke him so thoroughly in the ribs in his effort to break through that it woke him up from a dead sleep, all Vance is saying is that he definitely is. And oddly enough, despite that, he wouldn’t change it.

The door opens. Neither of them have knocked. Rooke plasters a smile on his face that’s actually more than halfway genuine. Vance slams his mouth shut quicker than he ever has before.

“Are you standing out here for fun?” Farren asks. He wouldn’t say it aloud, but she looks so much better than she did in November. “Oh, Jesus. I didn’t expect you to look so—”

“Real?” Rooke finishes.

“Alive,” she says. “But that works too.”

He’s going to ruin all of this for her, isn’t he?

This, though, she’s taking all in stride. She smiles at them both the same way, like she’s known Rooke for just as long.

Like Rooke isn’t actually dead and a ghost.

She is a banshee, after all. She’s seen the worst of death and she’s seen it, on top of that, often times before it happens. Her surprise has gone quickly; now she just looks the same as ever. Positive, most of the time, bubbly, tired around the eyes but still smiling.

“You have to do it,” Casper says, and Vance knows he’s right. He has to tell her before this goes any further. If he doesn’t one day he’ll have no choice but to show up to this door with Casper tailing him, in the flesh or close to it, and what then?

He doesn’t want to know, so he has to.

Farren is still smiling. He envies her for that. “So,” she says slowly, opening the door wider. “You guys coming in?”

He doesn’t have a choice.

—

—

—

“Please, don’t get pulled over,” Rory begs, a pleading look in his eyes.

Celia smiles. “Are you talking to me?”

His stern looks are nothing close to stern and instead more terrified than anything else. Rory has not yet learned the complicated practice of imitating Dimara.

It’s a relief, Celia thinks. The day he starts looking her like that is the day she dies. She gets it enough as is.

“You don’t have a motorcycle license,” Rory points out.

“Nadir showed me how to drive it!”

Tanis turns her head slowly, from the front door to them across the room. “Should I walk?”

“No,” they both say at the same time. Celia because she’s on Tanis-duty and objectively speaking can't afford to lose her, and Rory because he doesn’t want her walking anywhere alone, least of all through the barren Cape all the way to her parent’s house.

For once, in times when it’s not often, they agree on something.

“I’ll be outside,” Tanis announces. She waves at Rory, ducks into the kitchen to give Kelsea a one-armed hug, and then vanishes out the front door to the bike.

“Don’t get pulled over,” Rory repeats.

“I’ll go slow.”

“Can’t you get pulled over for going too slow?”

“I’m not asking you, who cannot drive, for advice on rules of the road,” Celia reminds him, patting his cheek. “We’ll be fine. It’s not that far. What about you guys?”

“What about us?”

“You’ll be fine?”

She says it, she knows, like him and Kelsea have made outlandish, awful plans and are planning on enacting them the second she and Tanis are gone. Since when do him and Kelsea even have the mindset for such things? Not in the timeframe that she’s known them, that’s for sure.

“We’re not going to leave the house,” he says. That’s what Dimara’s instructions were, anyway. She knows that Rory doesn’t see any point in leaving when everyone else is only going to be gone for a few days; the two of them were even left a phone to communicate with the outside world if need be.

Kelsea wanted to go but she also wanted to stay, Celia knows. Her family is still close by. If something goes down she doesn’t want to be too far away to warn them.

And she has no one, really, to worry about except all of the people who have gone and Rory. She’s safely convinced Kelsea won’t get into any trouble; he seems to attract it like he’s morphing into Blair.

“If you need me, call,” Celia says.

“We won’t.”

“But if you do,” she insists. “I can be back in twenty minutes.”

“You mean if you speed you can be back in twenty minutes.”

She grins. This smile is worse, reserved for moments that she needs to make him feel better, if her poor humor can even get there. She’s proven herself thus far on the road, but that was with him in the passenger seat and when it comes to him she’s careful more often than she isn’t.

Hopefully the same rules still apply to Tanis. Her parents wouldn’t be overly thrilled to find their daughter smeared across the road in front of the house.

Neither would she, really.

There are a lot of things to be nervous about right now, but she’s refusing to act as if any of them are going to phase her. If they hadn’t gotten Dimara back this would have all fallen apart by now, her most of all. Getting Dimara back saved her. In return she’s given Rory, and everyone else, a version of herself who is scared of very little, save for losing him. It’s nice to feel that way, to be so confident in successes and victories.

Fearless isn’t synonymous with unkillable, though. She knows it gets people killed more often than not.

“Hey,” Celia emphasizes, stretching up to poke at his cheek. It gains his attention from the wall. “I’ll let you know when we get there.”

“Got it.”

He’s never been apart from her since that day he came back to the house. She’s always been here, always gone with him. They don’t go places without each other. It’s two, three days, and it feels like a year. Perhaps it’s wrong of her to want him to close, but it’s difficult not to when you’re thrown into a world with nothing else.

She wants him. Is that so wrong?

“Don’t get into trouble,” she says, as if forgetting who she’s talking to. That’s the warning she needs, not him. She stretches up again, looping her arms around his neck to kiss him. 

He’s not the one she needs to worry about.

She lets go quicker than she’d like, but it’s the easier option. She pulls apart from him, says a quick goodbye to Kelsea, and follows Tanis outside. There’s something upset on his face even at a distant, when he comes to the door to close it behind her. The urge to run back up and hold him until it goes away is stronger than ever.

Her unwillingness to let go of him is too strong. It’s not healthy.

He doesn’t look scared, per say. Just worried. There’s not much reason to be scared when it comes to her. Celia knows she can handle herself just as well as the next person and probably better than most.

But if he’s not scared or worried about her, then what is it? The impending thought of having a baby in the house? Rory isn’t the type of person to let an infant frighten him. He’s basically one himself. Everyone else will be fine. They have each other

It only leaves one option: he’s scared of being here, alone save for Kelsea. He looks like he feels a certain way about it and she has no idea what it is.

So what does he think? The worst?

And most important, what does he know that she doesn’t?

—

—

—

For some reason, having the expectant and quite literal weight of a baby makes the house of horrors all the more worse.

Nadir has always hated this place. She was the first one here. Conscious, anyway. Kelsea doesn’t remember any of that except for when they finally left. Coming back here is an eerie reminder of that - if she hadn’t had this place to come, Kelsea might not still be alive.

That doesn’t mean she likes it, though. The people in it… maybe a single ratchet higher, but that’s it, and Parker has gained most of it single-handedly.

Camden and Isi are the same as ever. Generally speaking very big nuisances and unwilling to leave just about anything alone. Parker has been bolder and bolder each time they’ve been here. Each time she expects to find him gone, off to find his family like he told Rooke. What he’s waiting for, she doesn’t know.

And Shirin is, well, Shirin. A mystery that even the best of detective’s couldn’t solve. He’s insanely apathetic to a point but is also so curious about certain things that it’s enough to drive a person mad.

They’re really not here for her. It’s like she said, at this point it’s intuition and she knows much better than Shirin what’s going to happen. He can look and stare and wonder all he likes, but he doesn’t really know. This whole nine months into five thing was an accident on everyone’s part.

At least Camden is consistent. He still hates the thing like it’s been walking around bugging him for two years, minimum, and not like it’s yet to be born.

With Kali around, Isi seems more curious than normal. To Kali’s credit, she’s managed to mostly mask her horror at Isi’s general existence, but not enough that Isi isn’t absolutely delighted by it.

Suffice to say, this house is a mess, and she doesn’t like being in it.

For once, though, it has nothing to do with her.

You’d think the opposite, if only she really trusted a word that Shirin said or its accuracy. He knows what he’s doing, for certain, but after that? It’s anyone’s best guess.

This time they’re here for Kali.

It’s not the first time they’ve had this conversation, but it’s the first time they’ve brought her here. She had been reluctant to even get out of the car - not because she was frightened, but because she thought they were all pulling her leg. Everyone over time has the same dismayed reaction to this place.

They’ve all talked a lot. Dimara and Kali most of all, clearly, but even Nadir’s spoken with her about the trials and tribulations of quite literally living forever. None of said conversations have scared her off.

After several months of observation, Nadir thinks it’s done the opposite. The closer she gets into their little group the more she seems open to the idea, and then literally keen on it. Why an actual human with no supernatural abilities, and a hunter at that, wants to stick around nine and almost ten of them for all of eternity, she has no idea.

It all boils down to Dimara. Now that they’ve settled too, Kali won’t lose her. If she doesn’t go through with something like this then she dies, one day, while Dimara stays the way she is forever. In five, ten years it will get strange. In twenty years it will be beyond possible.

Shirin doesn’t seem opposed to the idea. He doesn’t seem thrilled in the first place about a hunter lurking about the house, but there’s not much he can do about it.

Camden offered to fight her. Dimara offered to rip his head off in exchange.

She’d do it, too. She never used to think that way about Kali, but if Dimara loves her than she’s one of them. The whole pregnancy shtick doesn’t mean she can’t light someone up.

She chooses to watch from a distance. They’re not doing anything today, maybe not in the near future, but soon. So long as Shirin knows what he’s doing there’s no use delaying it.

That’s the real question, though - does he? It seems like he fumbles into things on accident, causes side effects he had no idea existed. Blair and Vance are still adamant that Kelsea is different. They’re all alive forever because they couldn’t bring Dimara back otherwise.

And she’s about to have a perfectly fine, healthy kid in a lot less time than expected. But whatever.

The only intact chair she can find not in the main room holds firm, surprisingly, though it goes rocking about when she sits down. It’s a good enough view that she can see what’s going on. Blair is leaning in the archway, watching likewise. Nadir’s not close enough to hear what they’re saying.

Isi leans over her shoulder out of literally nowhere. “Now that is fucked up,” she comments casually.

“Says the person who was just always a living nightmare,” Blair fires back, without even turning around.

It’s honestly fair. At least her kid won’t have stitches holding their neck to the rest of their body.

Isi leans in far too close for anyone’s comfort, as if her eyes are capable of seeing through two layers of clothing and skin to boot, all the way inside.

Blair turns around, then. “Can we help you?”

“Nope. It has a heartbeat.”

“And?”

“It’s very strange,” she continues. “Should it?”

“Fuck if I know,” Blair answers. “Just because you and me don’t doesn’t mean it’s not capable of having one.”

Isi makes a noise. It doesn’t necessarily sound like approval. “It’s a he.”

“You don’t actually know that.”

“Yes, I do,” she insists, standing back to her full height. “And you owe me a hundred dollars when I’m right.”

“I didn’t agree—”

Isi vanishes. Blair sighs. Nadir allows herself to poke a single finger through the inky black trails of smoke rising to the ceiling before they’re out of reach.

They’re about done in the room. They don’t finish in time to escape Camden, who passes by her with a heavy look of disdain and then stops as if his curiosity has gotten the best of him.

He stares. His stare is for some reason not as bad as Isi’s.

“What?” Blair says. Camden folds his arms over his chest and stares some more. It goes on for so long that Blair steps forward and drives a foot into the back of his knee, nearly sending him careening to the floor in the middle of the hallway.

Nadir stands up in preparation for them to go at it, because it just seems predictable. Camden turns, kicks back, and misses.

He does nothing else.

“Keep that thing away from me,” is all he says.

“What?” she asks. “Not a baby person?”

He scoffs. “Not a fucking bloodsucking grotesque hybrid monster person.”

“I am going to let him rip you apart when he’s old enough,” Blair announces, with just enough of Isi’s previous delight to make it sound true. And a him aloud, already. It appears that Blair believed her. If Nadir’s being honest, she thinks she does too.

“Goody,” Camden says flatly. “Looking forward to it.”

“Looking forward to what?” Dimara questions, stepping into the hall, Kali on her heels. Camden mutters something undoubtedly annoyed under his breath and shoves past them both. When he’s done with a conversation he makes it known, at least.

“Nothing,” she replies. “Good discussion?”

“Good enough,” Dimara says. She wiggles her hand back; Kali grabs onto it hardly without looking, more conviction in her eyes despite them being placed elsewhere. It’s easy to read. It went well. It’s just not happening yet.

Soon, though.

“Still okay?” Dimara asks. It takes a moment to realize the question is directed at her, and she nods without thinking. “We can go, then.”

So off they go. They pile back up into the car in silence and she takes her seat, still slightly reclined back, more leg room than normal. She really is okay. A feeling has settled over her and it’s not fear. She’s nervous, as anyone else would be. Worried about the immediate future and the one far off, if they even have one. But she feels as if she’s come to a place that isn’t entirely bad, and perhaps enjoy is a strong word for what’s to come, but…

But it’s not bad, she repeats to herself. It’s really not.

There are far worse things to have to look forward to.

—

—

—

Staying at Tanis’ house is painfully stilted and difficult.

They have no idea who Celia is. They will not be getting the privilege of that in the few days that she is here. These two people, kind and generous and good-hearted as they may be, are used to the presence of Nadir.

She is not Nadir. Then again, Nadir never made the critical mistake of coming inside.

Celia did. She should have been Nadir.

Watching two parents interact with their daughter, though, that’s an experience unlike any other, and it’s something Celia has next to no experience with. The stakes are heightened, even, when they don’t see her very often and constantly worry about her safety when she’s gone. They both hold onto her for so long Celia feels like she’s not even there.

It’s for the best, really. She does want to be there, don’t get her wrong, but only so that Tanis isn’t stuck alone, unsafe. Her parents and an unfamiliar house weren’t exactly part of the draw.

Said parents are too nice to her though. So nice, in fact, that it feels fake but it somehow isn’t.

There’s not one thing that isn’t odd. Dinner is borderline distressing; she has no idea what to say or do beyond answer the questions she gets asked and lie about half of them. She can’t exactly tell them where she came from.

Tanis is different, too. She seems less tense in the shoulders. It must be that way when your parents have never wanted anything out of you except safety.

They ask of her a lot, Celia knows. Most people her age aren’t doing anything at all, and she’s doing all of it.

Celia may have survived falling, but Tanis has survived with both feet on the ground for nearly nineteen years and has come out of it miraculously unscathed.

All demonology aside, anyway.

When Tanis’ mother pulls her daughter alone into the other room, Celia is forced to stay put. Following would be weird. She’s not a dog that needs to be leashed to someone. She wishes she was staying here, but that’s not possible. Instead she sits like a statue at the table with her father bustles around and cleans up, wildly insistent that she absolutely not help.

There’s nothing to do until someone comes back for her, and it’s him first, dish towel slung over one arm. He sits down at his previously occupied chair.

Celia mentally prepares herself.

“Thank you,” he says. It looks like it took him a while to decide on those words.

“For what?”

“For being here with her.”

“Just trying to be good company.”

“No, I know what you’re trying to do,” he insists. “I haven’t seen many people try to protect her in the past; it’s easy to identify. There’s a reason she never… Tanis didn’t make friends at school and bring them home. Do you know why?”

“Why?”

“Fear. Fear, and distrust. If she opened up to one person and told them what she was then everyone found out the next day. And we both know what happens to people like her. They don’t last long.”

Neither do people like Celia. They’re hunted down like rabid dogs all because they don’t belong. She already knows she’s not supposed to be on the ground - getting confirmation in the form of a bullet to the head isn’t something she’s keen on.

It’s rare, though. There’s not many people like her. Tanis has watched her own kind get slaughtered for years until their numbers dwindled so far down it got harder and harder to find them.

They’re the same, but it’s still different. 

“She never allowed anyone in,” he continues. “Not until Nadir, anyway. I won’t pretend to know much about the rest of you, but I know it when I see it. You’re trying to protect her. I want you to know I’m thankful for it.”

She nods. Even coming from Rory she’s unsure how to accept anything just matter of fact good, so accepting it from a stranger is even more difficult.

“I’m sorry we don’t have a guest bedroom, either,” he says.

“Not an issue,” she says quickly. It’s not as if she’s had a bed to herself these past few months anyway. Tanis is going to be the one complaining come morning about half her space being hogged and all her blankets stolen.

Apparently she’s a blanket thief. Frankly she thinks Rory is full of shit on that one.

He stands up, taking the last near empty glass left on the table. His smile is just that - simple. There’s no hidden meaning in it, no further words to be expressed.

“You’re welcome, too,” she says. “But she doesn’t need it.

“She does,” he responds. “Everyone needs protecting regardless of what they think. Weak, strong, it doesn’t matter. Do me a favor - allow yourself to remember that. It’s not a bad thing to need it.”

She nods again, feeling like a robot. He departs with another smile, apparently satisfied.

There’s an issue with that. Allowing herself that isn’t easy; it’s come to a point where she doesn’t even know how to let someone protect her. People will try. Rory thinks he can.

Before all of this she really, genuinely didn’t need it. She was stronger than anything on earth.

Immortality is no longer the issue. She’s still fragile, breakable. One carefully aimed hit could kill her. It’s the same with Tanis. If the demon that possessed both Rooke and later Dimara wanted her dead, it would have done so, and it would have taken seconds.

Protection is tricky because once you have it, it becomes all you know. It makes you soft. Defenseless.

Tanis can handle herself. She has and she’ll continue to do so.

And Celia will, too. Maybe she’ll take his advice and let someone look after her, for once, but it won’t be permanent and it will never be the thing she comes to rely on.

She’s strong enough to do it herself.

It’s taken so long to come to that conclusion that she’s not about to give it up now.

—

—

—

Rooke keeps staring at him.

The more Rooke stares at him, the more nauseous he gets. It’s becoming enough of a concern that he might have to lock himself in the bathroom for a few minutes.

And Declan’s staring at him, too, sitting on the counter’s edge and probably predicting an appropriate countdown to Vance throwing up like he can sense it.

Maybe he can.

“He can’t,” Casper informs him. “You’re just dumb.”

Evidently.

“Just fucking get it over with already,” Casper continues. “The anticipation is killing me.”

He wants to say hasn’t it, already? but Declan’s watching him like a hawk and Rooke is eyeing him, wondering when he’s going to say it. It’s not just something he can say, though. It’s an entire story and he’s already convinced it’s not going to come out right at all.

Oh, fuck it.

“Finally,” Casper says cheerfully.

“Farren,” he says, ignoring him. Farren turns to him with an even, curious look on her face, one eyebrow slightly raised. He lets himself take in the last look he’s going to get at her normal face for a long while.

“I need to tell you something.”

She straightens up, not concerned in the slightest. Since the original incident back in November he hasn’t done anything, hasn’t put her through a single thing. There’s no reason she should question his intent not.

Except she should.

“It’s uh… you might hate me,” he tells her. “And that’s okay. But I need to tell you, and I’d rather do that before I don’t have a choice about it.”

“I’m just gonna go,” Declan cuts in, hopping from the counter.

“It involves you too, actually,” he says. “So if you could stay.”

Declan comes to a dead stop in the middle of the kitchen, a peculiar look on the face. Vance wishes more than anything that he could sink into the couch and never come out. He would, if Rooke wasn’t sitting here with him. There’d be no one to stop him.

“What in the world could possibly involve me?” he asks. It’s a good question, considering he doesn’t really know Declan at all. At best Declan tolerates his presence and doesn’t question it, at least until now. Someone who stops him from retreating to his room at the most opportune of times probably deserve that.

And Vance has no good words for this. He knew what he was coming to do but has nothing rehearsed.

“Um,” he says. Rooke gives him nothing short of an exasperated look, a funny thing to fit his face. “Casper isn’t exactly… gone.”

They don’t talk about Casper, is the thing. To both Farren and Declan he is gone, and maybe they talk about him when Vance isn’t around, but he never hears any of it. Sometimes he wishes he did.

“What?” Farren asks. She looks no different than before.

He’s not sure what he expected.

“He’s still here,” he says, differently. “Like… like Rooke, I think. Well not yet, anyway.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Declan asks. “Are you hearing yourself right now?”

“Myself, and him.”

“What?” Farren asks again, but it’s quieter this time. Her back has gone stiff, the line of her shoulders abnormally straight.

“The day we met,” he explains. “The first time, I mean. After you let go of me I started hearing a voice that no one else could. It was just in my head. For a long time I just thought I was insane.”

“You sound pretty fucking insane,” Declan says flatly.

“Maybe I am,” he concedes. “Because I don’t know why it was me and not you. He was trying to communicate with you.”

“Me?”

“It wouldn’t have been anyone else,” Casper says. “Declan would have lost his shit.”

Declan looks to be losing his shit anyway, he realizes belatedly. He’s still standing in the same spot but he looks unsettled, eyes darting around wildly, hands clenched into shaking fists at his side.

“I heard it for months,” he continues. “Months, until November, and then I came here. When you left I picked up your phone—”

“My phone,” she echoes. “And then you lost it.”

That’s one way to put it. Clawing himself open and then blacking out in the side alley next to the building wasn’t exactly how he planned that night to go. But it had been better than hurting her or anyone else. He didn’t deserve to be hurt either but everyone else even less so.

“If you can’t see him then you have no idea that he’s here,” Declan insists. “It’s—”

“He’s here,” Vance says, though he knows he doesn’t sound convincing.

“It’s bullshit,” Declan says, as if he never spoke at all. “He’s not here, you have no proof.”

He turns, and instead of heading immediately for his room he goes for the front door, instead, and his hand has wrapped around the door handle before Vance has even begun to move.

The lock flips from left to right, towards the frame, and the door locks shut.

“Tell him if he tries it again I’m tossing his ass out the window,” Casper says. Vance can absolutely not say that right that second. Declan has frozen in front of the door; he tries it, previously unlocked, and just as predicted it doesn’t budge.

Because someone interfered before he could get out.

Farren stands up, unhurriedly in her movements, but it’s not the pace of it that worries him. She looks… is petrified the right word? Her eyes are filled with tears threatening to spill over as she gets to her feet, gaze firmly on the now locked door in front of her.

“He’s here,” he repeats. “And he said you’re going out the window if you try it again.”

Declan makes a noise, something like a disbelieving huff, and finally lets go of the door.

Farren approaches. She unlocks it once again.

“What does she think, that I’m going to do it again?” Casper asks. “That’s going to get old fast.”

“Do it again,” he murmurs quietly. He can practically hear the sigh before the lock clicks shut again.

Farren’s laugh is maybe slightly this side of too hysterical, incredulous, but she leaves it alone at that. Neither of them move, eyes fixed on the lock as if it now holds the key to the universe, all its secrets and mysteries hidden inside.

“He really is,” she says finally. “But he’s not here. Why can’t we see him?”

“I think that’ll be sooner rather than later,” Rooke says. “It took me close to forever, but he’s been catching on fast.”

“I’m trying,” Casper assures. “Any day now. Just you watch.”

“I’ll be here,” he promises. Watching, waiting, expectant. For some strange reason he believes him, believes someone he’s never actually seen in person.

But Casper is here. He’s been here for a long while now, trying and failing. Getting better at it every-day. Vance will still be here when he finally figures it out, and so will Farren and Declan. One day this will all work out.

Farren rounds on him, eyes still shiny. “Why am I supposed to hate you?”

For keeping a five month long secret. There’s still no telling why Casper was able to make contact with him and not her - he could have stolen that opportunity from her just by allowing contact.

That may not have happened either, though. If Casper never got through to him, there’s no telling if he would have found anyone. He would still be lost, then, floating through time and space with no idea how to break back into existence. 

At least now there’s a chance.

Vance smiles. “No reason.”

Secrets are easy sometimes, lying easier, but the truth feels good, for once.

—

—

—

Predictably, Nadir can’t sleep.

She’s not the only one, though, and it’s not who you’d expect. Blair was actually the first of them to fall asleep once the past while of stress and worry and general exhaustion had caught up to him. He was so thoroughly out of it his head was about to slip off her leg and it didn’t look like he was going to wake up even if it did.

Dimara had followed not long after, managing to make herself comfortable after they had forced her to stop driving for a while. It clearly wasn’t difficult to sleep when you had someone at your side.

That left her with Kali, who had slept for some time but had seemed restless throughout most of it and who was now fully awake, though she hadn’t yet moved. Nadir could see her staring.

“How bad does it suck to sleep like that?” Kali asks without turning her head.

“Worse than you know. There’s a reason I’m not sleeping.”

It’s awful, too, when even walking drains energy out of you. Turns out carrying another human around for five months has the ability to completely suck the life out of you.

For all everyone calls it, him, whatever, a bloodsucking little monster though, everything has been relatively quiet. She knows it’s there; she can feel it. She’s been able to feel it for quite some time now. Apparently that’s not typical of a relatively normal timespan, but nothing about this is. This kid is going to come out any day now, and Shirin’s pretty insistent that its ready to.

But it’s… quiet, almost. It never causes her any grief.

Besides the sleeplessness, that is, but she asked for it.

“Do you think it’s going to be immortal, too?”

“Everyone thinks so.” She shrugs. “Would make more sense if it was.”

If it’s a blend of them both, then it only seems fitting that they’re bringing a kid into the world and dooming it to live for all of eternity. That’s not even crossing the bridge of the aging debacle. Who knows what will happen to it.

“What’s it like to be alive for so long?”

There’s the curiosity Nadir had been waiting for. For someone completely and totally human with no concept of anything but a normal life, being alive forever must seem daunting.

If she had been given the choice hundreds of years ago, she wouldn’t have done it.

And somehow Kali wants to.

“It’s not easy,” she admits. “You go through things. Phases, almost. Periods where you’re happy and okay with it and then more where you wish it had never happened at all. You get the opportunity to see some of the most incredible things in the world, but on the flip side…”

“The worst, too,” Kali murmurs. “Got you.”

“Just so you know, it’s not all bad. It’s better when you have people.”

“And is it now? Better?”

“Excluding the sleeplessness, yes,” she says. “You have to work on allowing yourself to be happy when you have forever. When you leave a normal amount of humanity behind it stops coming naturally. I’ve allowed myself to feel it despite all of the bad, and it feels good.”

“Even though we could all still die soon?”

“Even then.”

Kali nods, the first sign that she’s anywhere near active despite her eyes, punctuated with slow careful blinks every few seconds.

“You don’t have to do it, you know,” she tells her. “No one can decide it for you.”

“I want to.”

“For her, or for yourself? If you do it for her against your own will you’ll regret it before ten years are up.”

“If we last that long,” Kali utters under her breath, words Nadir only just manages to catch. Fair enough. They might not even have ten days, let alone years. No one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow. She has a feeling, but she won’t say it aloud.

“It’s for both of us,” Kali says. “I think we both deserve to be happy.”

Don’t they all? They’ve all fought battles and made decisions, things they never should have had to face in an ideal world. Nadir keeps stumbling upon them like the path she’s on is littered every few steps with one. They’re about to have another, too, but her and Blair made that decision together and there’s no going back from it now.

It’s happening.

And it might… it might just be happening now.

She allows herself a glance at the time. 11:56. When she said tomorrow she hadn’t realized just how close it was. Closer than she would have liked.

Kali says something, a quiet murmur, but she misses it, and as it goes ignored Kali finally turns to look at her.

“You okay?”

“Don’t know,” she answers. “Maybe? This doesn’t make any sense. It’s not normal.”

“Was it ever going to be?”

No. No, it wasn’t. But a normal, even vaguely human sign of it would be fucking nice. Instead she’s just sitting here with this dreadful feeling from her head to her toes, only a feeling of intuition to guide her as to what’s going to happen.

And something’s going to happen. She’s certain now.

“Where are we?” she asks.

“Just outside of Bangor.”

“And there’s a hospital?”

“About a half hour away, yeah,” Kali answers. “Do we need to go?”

They do. She doesn’t want to, but there’s not really another choice. The terror of being stuck out here letting it happen is worse than the thought of ending up in a hospital. She finally allows herself a nod. Kali stares and waits for the answer to change, but when it doesn’t she gently detaches herself from Dimara’s side and climbs over the center console back into the driver’s seat.

“Let them sleep,” she instructs, rooting around for the keys. “I don’t think they’ll be getting any for a while.”

That’s for certain, at least.

The car rumbles to life. Nadir leans back against the car door, careful not to dislodge Blair. He looks genuinely peaceful, a strange rarity, and he’s got a half hour maximum before it’s all shattered, if he’s not disturbed sooner.

It’s going to be the opposite of pretty. Nothing about this was ever going to be easy, not when half the stories they’ve told about the kid have been lies even before it was born. Yes, it’s perfectly normal. So are they. Yes, it’s supposed to be happening now.

And frankly, that’s all people need to know.

For all she knows, maybe it was meant to happen now.

—

—

—

Celia gets a text at 11:59pm: headed to the hospital.

She thinks Nadir, at first. On further inspection as she comes stumbling half-blind from the bathroom and into Tanis’ dark room it’s actually Kali.

Of all the people that sent her a message, and it was Kali. For some reason she’s not the least bit surprised.

“You got it too?” she asks Tanis, whose face is only visible because of the glow reflecting off her own phone. She nods.

There’s nothing to do, then, but wait. And sit here. And sit here some more. Not that she’s annoyed or troubled to be spending time with Tanis’ parents, but it’s hard to stay here when she knows what’s going on elsewhere. Unless she plans on trusting herself to take them God only knows how many hours up state on the bike then she’s stuck here.

It’s for the best. That’s why they all came to this agreement about where to go. What use would she be with them, anyway?

She slips under the covers, tucking herself into the unfamiliarty of someone else’s childhood bed for the first time literally ever. Tanis looks no more comfortable than she does.

“Don’t stress about it,” Celia says, noting the look on her face. “It’s out of your control.”

“That’s why I’m stressed about it,” Tanis murmurs, curling up into a rather small position. The blankets don’t even smell like anything; just generic cleanliness. This isn’t home to Tanis any more than it is to Celia. She makes a noise of understanding low in her throat, tugging back some of the blankets when Tanis rolls some of them out of her reach.

Celia is good about not stressing, about anything. Even that brief flash of worry at leaving Rory and Kelsea alone up at the house was gone quick enough, though she’s sure her eyes betrayed her true feelings on the matter.

Ideally she’d like to put herself through the roof from the anxiety of it alone, but that’s beyond her power. She wishes she had something like that; it could help them. Having something to calm her down would be more important than being useless. At least Tanis has something. Without a weapon in her hand or a lucky thrown punch she’s as good as dead.

She sends another text while she’s leaning away from Tanis, just where? and as expected gets no immediate response back.

They’ve got bigger priorities.

“Are you scared?” Tanis asks.

“Of what?”

“Everything,” Tanis says. “You know, Clearson and all the fucking demons and the impending threat of an almighty apocalypse. And maybe our possible deaths, too.”

Celia is too busy noting everything that’s going on currently, is her issue. She has yet to look at the bigger picture. Sure, she might die soon, but she could die anyway. She could fall off the bike tomorrow and become roadkill. You never know.

It’s the little things that get her. The look on Rory’s face before she left the house, Blair’s telling silence the past few days, unwilling to talk, the closed wound that sometimes peeked out from the top of Dimara’s shirt.

The little things were the worst ones.

“Are you?” she asks instead.

“More of the fact that I don’t know,” she admits. “If I at least had a clue about what was going to happen I don’t think it would be so frightening.”

“Do you think you could see it, if you tried?”

“Maybe.” Tanis shrugs. “I’m sort of scared to try though, too. I never see anything good.”

“Do you wanna try?”

“You’d let me?”

“I figure if someone eventually doesn’t you’ll do it on your own, and that’s infinitely more dangerous. At least this way you’re supervised.”

Tanis nods. She rolls onto her side so she’s facing Celia, at least her shoulder, though the bottom half of her face is concealed by the blankets.

“Maybe tomorrow, then,” she says quietly.

“Alright,” she agrees. It’s not really up to her, anyway. She just needs to be there. “Do your parents know?”

“They know I can do it. They’ve never seen it. I told them I don’t anymore.”

“Lies are easier.”

They both seem to agree on that, if not much else. It should be the other way around. Lying shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind when you speak to someone regardless of what it is, and it seems like it’s all they’re doing these days.

She’d be more comfortable on her side, but she won’t fall asleep with Tanis staring her in the face and she feels too bad to turn her back. She remains staring at the ceiling, watching the fan turn around in slow rotations. The faint wind on her face is a nice feeling.

“I’m definitely not sleeping,” Tanis says.

“Try.”

“Are you?”

“Trying right now.”

Another lie. She’s not. Celia closes her eyes regardless and goes as still as she can manage, allowing herself to relax. There’s no telling how long she stays there in that exact position. Tanis is awake for a long while as promised, but eventually, in small increments, Celia feels her dropping off. She puts the phone down first, plunging the room into proper darkness. The longer she sits there the more the tiredness begins to tug at her.

Celia opens her eyes and Tanis is asleep to her right, breathing soft and even.

She finally gives in to the temptation to turn her back and goes to sleep herself.

—

—

—

Vance is awoken by a scream.

It's like nothing else he's ever heard before, a long, reedy wail that stretches on and on and on. It sounds like grief personified. 

It stops. He is far from the first to move.

He nearly rolls off the couch, disoriented in the dark, and is saved by Rooke pinning him back to the flattened cushions. He's already on his feet. There's a distant sound of footsteps, a slamming door. Not so distant, really. It's in the apartment.

"That was—"

"Farren," Casper says. He says it even before Rooke does.

That was Farren screaming.

Nothing immediately clicks in his sleep-riddled brain save for the urge to get up, and fast. Rooke is gone by the time he does, and he finds him in Farren’s doorway. Declan’s already in there, crouched at the edge of her bed.

Her eyes are focused on nothing. The glare reflected in them is one of the few distinctive things he can make out.

“It’s close,” Casper says.

“What’s close?”

“Shit,” Declan says quickly. “Shit shit shit.”

He rockets back onto his feet and shoves past Vance, out the door. Farren is still sitting there motionless save for the trembling of her hands, eyes glazed and faraway. If Vance had any clue what to do he’d approach her.

“Someone’s gonna die,” Casper murmurs, almost completely unfazed. Vance blinks. Someone? Who?

That’s what that scream was, he realizes. It’s clearly something both Casper and Declan have heard before.

Farren’s eyes refocus in a split second, eyes darting to where Declan had been crouched beside her.

She looks at the both of them, huddled in the doorway. “Where is he?”

Vance heard the click of the front door shutting just a second ago, Declan’s footsteps thundering away down the hall and to the stairs. He’s not sure why.

“Where is he?” she repeats, something more frantic in her voice.

He thinks, almost absentmindedly, oh shit, and isn’t even sure why before he takes off after him.

The door to the stairwell is almost completely shut by the time he charges out into the hall and chases after him. Just the sound of Farren’s voice alone was enough to spur him into following, the rising hysteria. She sounded like she knew what was going to happen before there was any possibility of it, and she couldn’t, but maybe…

He didn’t even know what he was saying. There was no way for her to tell that someone was going to die beyond the scream, so she certainly couldn’t know whom. It was just a premonition that always came true, nothing more.

And now he’s outside, Declan fifteen feet in front of him and five steps off the curb into the street. Headlights round the corner.

There’s no foolish second where he thinks they’re going to go around him; something in him just knows the second the car appears, swerving wildly across the street. Wherever Declan goes it goes too.

It’s only fifteen feet, and someone is supposed to die. Someone is.

But it’s not going to be Declan, because he gets there in time.

It’s a sliver of a second in which speed allows him to go flying into the street, the headlights canceling out everything else around them except for the hand he manages to lock around his arm. It’s easy enough to essentially fling him back towards the sidewalk, not even checking to see where he’s going to land. It’s far enough.

Declan leaves the picture. He’s still in it.

The car collides with him, instead.

There’s another scream again, just before it happens. Not the same as before. This one is pure, unadulterated fear.

And then it hits him, and he hears nothing. He feels all of it though.

It’s just the corner. Front left. The headlight shattering is the last thing his brain absorbs before the force actually hits him full on and then sends him flying. It would look like he just glanced off the side from far away, but it’s worse than that. It feels like both his chest and torso collapse inwards and then detach from his body outright.

Something happens, presumably an odd, twisted fall, and then he’s on the ground, face-down, gravel pressing into his cheek.

He can barely breathe.

Someone is still shouting, though his ears are ringing so badly he can barely hear it. The road is warm underneath him, almost humming as the car stops twenty feet away with its tail-lights casting a red glare over the area.

It’s stopping. That would be good in a normal circumstance, but this isn’t one and it’s definitely not.

His wrist holds when he plants his hand underneath him, but nothing else does. He can’t even lift himself up on his own.

“Vance! Knife!”

That’s Rooke. Rooke is somewhere out here with him. Knife? Right. He has one of those. Dimara made him take one and it’s still sheathed in his back pocket.

There’s only one reason he would need it.

He turns his head, feels blood drip off his cheek, and the red he sees coming directly at him isn’t the tail-lights anymore. It’s eyes.

Aubrey was right about one thing.

And apparently Clearson and his demons aren’t done with them yet.

“Go!” he manages, voice coming out like his throat has been scraped open, raw and bleeding. It might be. He can only hope that Rooke listens. Vance has enough to deal with right now and him getting possessed isn’t something he’d like to add to it.

A hand curls into his shirt directly between his shoulders, pointed talons breaking the first layer of skin on contact, and he doesn’t allow it more than two inches off the ground before he fumbles the knife out and nearly drops it.

He doesn’t, though. Someone somewhere is looking out for him in that regard.

His arm is the only thing working, another miracle entirely as he twists around trapped in its grip and just stabs.

There’s nothing else to it. He has no idea where it lands, but feels the blade catch on flesh and digs in deeper, until he’s rewarded with a shrill, furious scream that goes almost as deep as Farren’s did. He rips it out, ignoring the resistance, and stabs again. This time there’s blood - a lot of it. It sprays out all over his shirt.

It releases him, and he hits the road with a thud. It falls likewise, deciding to slump to the ground just a foot left of his legs, the knife wedged into the base of its throat.

“Vance!”

He can barely fucking move. He reaches a hand out, half-blind, searching. His hand collides with something, smooth metal and then the rough grooves of a tire. One of the cars at the side of the road. That’s how far he went.

That was Farren’s voice. He lifts his head up again, waiting until his vision straightens to focus on the movement. It’s her and only her; Rooke is gone and Declan is evidently motionless on the sidewalk, bleeding from the head. More red. There’s a definite chance he pitched him out of the street too hard.

But he’s not dead. That’s something.

He grapples for the tire again and drags himself to his knees, ignoring the searing pain in his chest. He’s felt worse pain. He feels it every month.

That’s what he’s telling himself, anyway.

“Vance, don’t,” Farren shouts. Don’t what, he wants to ask, but he can hazard a guess. He reaches for the side-view mirror and pulls until both arms are shaking and one leg is underneath him, almost all the way straightened. His other will still barely move.

“Stop moving! Just stay there!”

He can’t stay here - he’s in the road. That’s not safe for anyone. And what is she going to do, come out and get him? If he can barely move himself there’s little chance she’s going to be able to.

He plants his other foot on the ground, feels just the beginning of white-hot, stabbing pain, and then collapses.

He’s caught before he can hit the ground.

Rooke is still not here. He knows that intrinsically now because that’s just what they all do, no matter how foggy his head is, no matter the pain coursing through his body. It’s not Rooke. Farren is still on the sidewalk with Declan, though when he looks at her she stands. All the color drains out of her face.

“Oh, fuck me,” Casper says flatly, except it’s not in his head.

That was right behind him.

Farren’s mouth parts and closes again, words lost. He looks down at the hands caught underneath his arms. They’re solid, real. Something is wrong at the edges, a faint shimmer where it almost looks as if he’s imagining them there. It wouldn’t be there at all if the hands belonged to someone who knew what they were doing, who did this every day.

What did Rooke say? Something about snapping back into a physical form, if only there was something that could cause him to do it?

It might have been those words. It could have been something else entirely for all he knows.

Casper just stopped him from collapsing.

“Fuck, you can fucking see me, can’t you?” Casper asks wildly. “Shit.”

Vance can see nothing except his hands, resolutely stuck in one spot. If he even turns to try and see his face he risks falling, and Casper might not be so lucky catching him a second time.

“Tell me what to do,” Casper insists. “What the hell do we do?”

Farren has yet to move, Declan unconscious at her feet. It doesn’t look like she has the power to glance away from him for even a second; he can’t say he blames her on that front.

Casper’s hands tighten, but don’t vanish. He’s pulled up another few inches, almost straightened completely, but the pain that lances through his chest isn’t worth it at all. He’d rather be on the ground. Once the pain hits it’s impossible to catch his breath, the scent of his own blood choking him. He doesn’t know where it’s coming from.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks, forcing the words out. Casper drags him closer to the sidewalk, hands painfully tight. Farren looks like she almost goes to her knees at the sight of them moving.

“Why are you— oh, don’t you fucking dare,” Casper orders. “Don’t you dare pass out, I’m serious.”

It’s happened before. It’s happening again right now.

Casper’s seen it just as much as anyone. Maybe even more. There’s a chance it might be their thing.

One single hand lets go, but he stays on his feet. Somewhat. Casper turns him, pulling him up the curb with one last heave. His feet catch against the edge of it and burn. The glimpse he gets of Casper’s face once they’re off the road, real and close, is a brief and fleeting one. 

It matters more than he thought it would to see him here.

It’s a good thing it does, because he follows his own predictable course and blacks out two seconds later regardless.

—

—

—

The morning is oddly quiet.

Celia can only hear one thing, and that’s both of Tanis’ parents maneuvering about downstairs, doing God knows what.

Whatever it is, it’s not the easiest thing to pick out from behind the locked bedroom door, so she truly has no idea what they’re doing. It’s not very loud. She’d like to ask Tanis, but Tanis is otherwise indisposed at the moment, eyes white as snow and somewhere very far away.

She considers, for a second, poking her finger into the bowl of water Tanis filled up in the bathroom, but she feels like that would fuck something up.

She checks her phone. It’s only been three minutes. Close to four. She set a timer just in case. Tanis seems adamant about not staying under for too long, but for now it doesn’t look as if anything bad has happened. She hasn’t even moved.

Celia sends off another text to both Rory and Kali, and like the last three she’s sent to each of them, they both go unanswered.

There’s no chance that Rory is still asleep; he’s awake earlier than she is, most days, and it’s nearing noon. Kali perhaps she could understand if she was at all deeply involved, but chances are she’s just sitting in a waiting room with Dimara standing by for news. Kali will answer her eventually, she’s convinced, or at least Dimara will. They made it to the hospital alright and checked in - that she knows for a fact. The four of them are together there.

Rory and Kelsea, though, she trusts much less. They may seem like the pair least likely to get into trouble but that’s also never been tested. They’ve certainly never been left to their own devices with no supervision.

She just has a bad feeling. It may just be that and nothing else. A feeling.

She’s hoping that’s what it is, but isn’t particularly optimistic.

A text comes in from Kali three minutes later: We’re all good here. Text you when we’re headed back.

Already?

Celia isn’t even sure what to say to that, beyond okay. Has it happened already, then? It’s just shy of twelve hours since they got the first text that they were headed towards the hospital. It certainly could have happened since then.

That doesn’t explain the other two, then. She’s going to give Rory a piece of her mind the second she sees him next.

At eight minutes and forty-seven seconds Tanis blinks, once and then several times over in the span of a heartbeat. The white almost bleeds from the corners of her eyes and then they return to normal. Easy, recognizable Tanis.

Celia holds up the phone for her to read. Tanis regards it with a blank look on her face, swallowing a few times as she regains her bearings.

“Is that all she said?” she asks finally, gripping the edge of the table. Celia blows the two candles closest to her out.

“Sure is,” she replies. “Anything interesting on the other side?”

“No,” she says, “It was… weird. Really weird. I was just walking through darkness the entire time. I couldn’t see anything.”

“So nothing happened?”

“Not nothing. I could hear things even though I couldn’t see them.”

“Like what?”

“Screaming, and people running, and fire.”

“So a lot of bad shit,” Celia says flatly. “Awesome.”

She shouldn’t have expected anything less from the black hole that is apparently Tanis’ brain when she screws off to the other side, whatever or wherever it is.

Tanis puts out the rest of the candles, shifting back and forth on her heels. There’s something unsure in her eyes. Her whole face looks that way, really, lips pressed together until they’re white at the edges, eyebrows furrowed.

“You sure that was it?”

“Yeah,” Tanis answers. “I just hate that it’s never anything good.”

Perhaps because there’s nothing good to look forward to, nothing at all. Celia keeps that thought to herself. Chasing Tanis away from the things she can see isn’t the way to go about this.

Besides, maybe it’s just that there’s no good now. It doesn’t mean that there can’t be somewhere beyond the horizon. For all she knows they just have to get through this period, finish what Beckett started, and then the good will come.

Or maybe Rory will never answer her, and it never will.

Tanis takes the bowl to the sink to empty and Celia gets up from the bed to unlock the door, carrying the phone with her. She sends another text to him.

Call me when you see this, please.

She’s being stupid. Beyond stupid, at this point. There can’t be anything wrong. She’d know if something was. Rory going radio silent on her is just a way to distance them for a few short hours, and he’ll probably call her after dinner to say he let the phone die on accident.

Or not on accident. Maybe he just doesn’t want to answer her at all.

And if he doesn’t, if that’s how they’re doing this, then she’s going back tonight.

—

—

—

There’s conversation going on around him.

Quiet, hushed murmurs are echoing around Vance like gentle song. Different voices, different meanings. All the same level of quiet. It’s intentional, clearly.

The intention, he realizes slowly, is almost certainly him. He hasn’t yet opened his eyes. He does so only when he allows himself to stretch out, testing how far he can go before the agony sets in, and then careens off the couch.

He thuds into the floor. The conversation stops. There’s a muttered shit, something he processes as he shakes his head to clear some of the fog. Everything still aches, but in a very dull sort of way. 

“Hey,” Rooke murmurs, crouching down beside him. He curls a hand over his shoulder. “You okay?”

So Rooke’s back, then. He was gone for awhile there, and he still was when Vance passed out. It has to be good that he is now.

“I think,” he decides, nodding. His head doesn’t hurt too bad. His chest is still tender to the touch, difficult to press too hard into even with his fingers alone.

“You should be on the path to almost fully healed. It’s been just over twelve hours, and you’ve been out since. Hopefully all of your bones are back to normal.”

Twelve fucking hours. More than that, really. He has no idea what time it was when he ran outside. Someone in the four o’clock range? It could have been passed that for all he knows. At least his bones are back to normal, he can tell. His body is good at putting them back together, even when his entire chest cavity is threatening collapse.

“I am so sick and tired of watching you pass out,” Casper informs him. It takes him another moment, just like twelve plus hours ago.

Vance presses his forehead into the carpet. “You’re still here?”

“For now.” His voice is coming from across the room. That must have been where the conversation was taking place.

“He vanished not long after we got you up here,” Rooke murmurs. “He doesn’t know how to hold it.”

“And he can hear you,” Casper says dryly. Even the thought of him standing across the room like he’s just always been there is enough to make his head start spinning again. At least Rooke is back, right by his side with no definite plans to go anywhere.

It’s genuinely almost too much to process.

“Where’s Declan?” he asks, dreading the answer. Farren’s here, somewhere. Across the room with Casper, he thinks. He’s the only one missing.

“Sleeping. We got back from the ER three hours ago,” Farren says quietly. There she is. “Severe concussion and six stitches in his forehead later.”

“But he’s…”

“Okay, yeah.”

“The head injury was unintentional.”

“You saved his life,” Casper interrupts. “You realize that, right?”

He did, didn’t he? Declan’s alive because of him, and he took the brunt of it in immediate response but that’s fine because he’s okay, too. The only thing dead at the end of the day is the demon he left lifeless in the middle of the road. No one’s talking about that, so he can only assume it was dealt with. He hopes it was.

It takes a while, but he tilts his head to the side and Rooke moves with him. It’s a good thing he’s already anchored to the floor, because Casper staring at him is jarring. Farren has one arm curled around his, and she smiles.

“Sure you’re okay?”

He is, really. Genuinely. He nods, and her smile grows a bit. She looks haggard, at best. Going without sleep combined with a brief stint of trauma and that’ll happen.

His phone starts ringing across the room, teetering at the edge of the coffee table. At least his brain can distinguish that it’s his.

“It’s probably Dimara,” Rooke offers, getting to his feet. Vance stays where he is, allowing Casper enough room and time to crouch down beside him in the now unoccupied space.

“What?” he asks, noting his stare. It’s odd to be able to note that.

“Thanks,” Casper says. “But also, you’re welcome.”

“For what?”

“For not letting you collapse.”

“I think if I had I would have died,” he says plainly. It just feels right. Wrong, but right. Hitting the ground that hard at nearly his full height would’ve tumbled him right into the grave.

Casper snorts. “Dramatic.”

“You know me, the most dramatic person of all.”

“Yeah, I do,” Casper says quietly. They have this weird mutual thing going on where they both know each other too well and are just now looking each other in the eyes for the first time. He still doesn’t look as solid as Rooke, not as… real? A normal person wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

“No, okay, hold on,” Rooke says in a rush. His phone has stopped ringing and is now pressed to Rooke’s ear. “No, this isn’t— did you mean to call Celia?”

Rooke pauses, eyes concerned. He tries nearly half a dozen times to begin another sentence, only a single syllable managing to get out before he’s interrupted from the other end.

“Rory, hold on,” Rooke insists. That answers one question. “Right now? Are you—”

He pulls the phone away from his ear, a peculiar look on his face.

“Did he hang up on you?” Casper questions.

“No, it… I think it went dead,” he says softly, dialing the number again. This time he doesn’t even bother lifting it to his ear, and Vance sees the call stop before it ever really began. Voicemail.

“What did he say?” Vance asks.

“That something was happening and he couldn’t explain what but he needed us back right now, before it got—”

“Got what?”

“I don’t know, worse? The line went dead.”

Worse in what way, exactly? If Rory wasn’t willing to explain that likely means it was either too convoluted or he didn’t have the time. Or both, in which case they’re in trouble and time was even more fragile than he thought it could be.

And he asked them to come back.

“Call Celia,” he instructs, lurching to his feet too. The ache returns into his legs and back into his chest, but he’s okay. Casper is forced to let go of him, whenever he started holding on in the first place. Vance isn’t sure.

“Where are you going?” Farren asks.

“Home. If he said they need us, then they need us.”

“And how are you going to get there? You’re not in any condition to run.”

“I don’t care whatsoever,” he assures her.

“She’s right, you need to stay here,” Rooke agrees. “I’ll go.”

“We’ll all fucking go, how about that?” Casper interrupts. “Declan’s not going to run off if we leave him.”

“You don’t exactly have a car.”

Casper gives Farren a look. It’s not particularly filthy, but something in it is annoyed. “I can’t believe you didn’t buy another car.”

She steps in front of Vance’s path on his quest to get to the door, holding her arms wide in front of it. “I’m sorry I wasn’t exactly prioritizing that after you crashed our last one and died in it,” she snaps, though it’s not in any way defensive. She just sounds very sad again. He had gotten used to that sound not being present in their conversations.

“Hey, Celia,” Rooke says. “What about the car from last night?” he asks, in a more hushed voice.

“What car?”

“The one it was driving,” Casper tells him. “We hid it around back.”

So what the fuck are they waiting for, then? He gives Farren an expectant look and she holds both hands up, though doesn’t allow him access to the hall.

“I’m driving,” she says.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

“No one else even try—”

“Okay,” he emphasizes, reaching around her for the door handle. She steps out of the way to let him through and Casper is close on his heels, grabbing at his arm for a split second when he stumbles, the feeling of walking come back over twelve hours later. Rooke is slower to follow, though he’s clearly gotten through to Celia, and Farren locks the apartment door behind him. Declan will be safe for a few hours; he didn’t save his life just for it to be for nothing.

“How bad can it be?” Casper asks. He holds open the door to the stairs.

“You’ve spent nearly as much time living with them as I have,” he reminds him. “You know just how bad it can be.”

“Fuck,” Casper says under his breath, putting more feeling into the word than most people would be capable of in a lifetime.

Yeah. Fuck.

Vance can only hope that the bad is just that - bad. Bad is fixable and forgivable and most of all not worthy of any endings. You move on from it. It’s the horrific shit that gets you, the stuff that’s beyond repair and completely fragmented. 

He can only hope that it’s not, when they get there, but he gets the feeling it’s going to be.

Maybe the demon only half-counted. Someone was supposed to die last night. He took something from death, from Charles fucking Clearson, and now someone’s paying for it. There’s nowhere to look for reassurance on that front, either. Casper and Rooke both know how bad it can be. Farren, in the very least, has an idea.

And Vance has already accepted the worst.


	2. The Woods and the Water

Home.  
April 12th, 5:44am.

The house is much too quiet for Rory to get a good night’s sleep.

He hasn’t slept in a bed alone since August, either.

Getting used to the humanity of things was odd enough, and that was before he got comfortable. He gained familiarity and now he had lost it; a dramatic way to put things for only a few days apart, sure, but a valid one nonetheless.

He didn’t like sleeping alone anymore. He found that out quickly. Being alone meant that the bed never warmed up properly all the way and that he could stretch out as far as he liked, but he  _ didn’t  _ like it. 

It allowed him the misfortune, too, of hearing everything going on in the house outside of his little safe haven. He had left the door open for once, because Bagel tended to switch rooms throughout the night, and although theirs was not typically one of the one’s chosen there were only two of them left, now.

He never comes, though. He must stay with Kelsea.

Leaving the door gives him an entirely new experience, one he’s not eager to have. All of the noises are amplified - every little creak of the floor and the wind against the outside walls and Kelsea when she gets up in the middle of the night and pads to the bathroom. The noise of her footsteps sets him on edge for the rest of the night.

There’s nothing bad in this house and there’s no way for someone to get to it, either. The shield Tanis created around it protects them from even the worst of things.

It doesn’t stop the mind from racing, though.

Rory finally calls it quits just shy of seven in the morning, having spent the past two hours staring at the ceiling. Hopefully the deprivation will have him out like a light later on. He doesn’t bother sending a message to Celia, as she won’t be up this early, and he has a while, certainly, before anyone at all is going to bug him.

Bagel is asleep on the front mat up against the door and looks more excited than Rory has ever seen him at the sight of someone awake. Apparently he’s missing everyone just as much, unused to the lack of noise and bustle around the house. He’s not used to being the one to fill up his food bowl in the morning - someone always beats him to it. After he’s eaten half the bowl away and once Rory has shoved half a granola bar down his throat he opens the front door.

Now that winter has finally started to fade off he doesn’t mind being out anymore. Cold water is much, much different than air, and he was used to living down there. This was something entirely new, a foreign experience.

And Bagel seems to enjoy it much more, too. He was hardly tall and robust enough to get through the worst of the snowbanks; most trips outside ended up with someone carrying him back in. Now he charges out without a care in the world, darting between Rory’s legs to practically throw himself off the front porch.

He sits down on the front steps, barefooted, and watches him circle around the grass at the front of the house and the beginning of the meadow. The good thing about the dog is that he never goes anywhere. He never tries to get away, either. It’s as if he knows where he belongs and where he’s supposed to stay and never challenges it, even when most of the people here have left him for a short time.

Of all the negative feelings, Rory could get used to this one. Surrounded by the shield, with the comforting noises of the early rising birds and the wind in the trees, it’s nice.

Except there’s something going on upstairs. He can hear it.

Rory waits there for a while, listening, but it doesn’t take supernatural senses to hear it. He’s left the door half-open to air the house out.

He checks to make sure Bagel is still close by and then creeps halfway back up the stairs in the house, looking around. Everything looks the same. Both Dimara and Rooke’s doors are shut, but they left them that way. His is still cracked open, and Kelsea’s is all the way. She never leaves it like that, he doesn’t think. Not when she’s sleeping anyway. It’s only like that after she comes out.

She did come out, sometime in the middle of the night. He’s not sure of the time exactly, but not long before he woke up for good.

On second thought, did he ever hear her go back to her room? He was alerted to her traveling down the hall to the bathroom, presumably, as if she was an intruder that had barged in, but never heard her go back.

Her door is open. The bathroom door is closed.

The bathroom door is  _ never  _ closed.

“Kels?” he calls down the hall. No response. He hurries back outside, collects the rather mournful dog, and deposits him back inside the safety of the house behind the locked door. Bagel looks beyond upset at the fact, turning back to the door expectantly.

Rory leaves him there, bad as it sounds. He doesn’t exactly have the time to talk to the dog right now.

He ends up at the end of the hall just next to their room, unsure of what to do. Unsure of what he’s doing, honestly, which is approximately nothing but standing in front of the bathroom door, sick to his stomach.

“Kelsea?” he wonders, leaning closer. The noise has stopped. He’s not sure what it even was.

“Yeah?” she answers finally, voice small. He breathes out a sigh of relief. She’s okay, she’s still in there. He doesn’t know why, but it’s better than her being all the way gone.

“You okay?” he asks. “Have you been in there a long time?”

Rory leans a shoulder against the door, listening for any more sounds, but isn’t rewarded with anything interesting. He thinks he can hear her shuffling about, but that’s it.

“A while,” she settles on. “Do you need to get in here?”

There’s two more bathrooms in this house. He’d manage. “No. I just want to know that you’re okay.”

He hears her inhale and the shuddering exhale in response, even louder than the first.

“I’m not sure,” she admits. Her voice goes quieter.

“Can you let me in?” Rory’s not even sure the door locked, but that’s not his mission. Maybe it isn’t. Kelsea’s not a locking the door type of person, not to keep people out, anyway.

“As long as you promise not to lose your mind. There’s a lot of blood in here.”

“What?” he asks, already alarmed. 

“I told you not to!”

“I already am!” he insists, wildly, and tries the door. It swings in - he was right about one thing. Kelsea catches it from the other side and stops him from immediately barging in, sticking her head out through the gap made.

There’s blood on the counter. He can see it over her shoulder. It’s smeared over the lip of the sink and all over the shower curtain and there are messy streaks of it from one end of the bathtub to the other. The porcelain is almost entirely red.

It’s definitely coming from her, he realizes belatedly. The entire back of her shirt is soaked through.

“What the  _ hell _ ?” he asks, nearly breathless. He’s not equipped for this. He doesn’t even like the sight of blood.

“I’m fine now,” she announces. “I was trying to clean it up.”

Trying and failing, by the looks of it. That was what he heard, the incessant squeaking of someone trying to clean out the grooves of the tub and all around the edge of the sink.

“Looks like it,” he says weakly.

“Rory, I’m okay.”

“You’re bleeding  _ everywhere,  _ you’re not —”

“I’m not anymore,” she tells him. “I’m just… confused.”

“About what?”

She takes a deep breath. Steeling herself, he realizes. She clenches both hands into fists, knuckles white from the sudden pressure.

“Don’t freak out,” she says, turning around. He gets an even better look at the back of her bloodsoaked shirt before she hikes it all the way up, until it’s tucked nearly underneath her arms. Her back from shoulder to hips is streaked with blood like the bathtub is, but something there is unique to her and only her, a spot just below her shoulder blades where something is  _ protruding,  _ almost, nothing skin-like or human about it.

“Are those?” he asks, too horrified at the sight of it to even say it.

“Wings?” Kelsea finishes. “Yeah.”

The start of them, anyway. The beginning seems to have emerged from her back just over her spine and is now growing something like it has a mind of its own. The wings themselves are hardly there yet, just translucent fragile wisps that are hardly two or three inches long.

If he looks closely enough, even that little beginning has a faint golden sheen to it.

“That’s… that’s supposed to happen, right? You’re supposed to get those.”

“Yeah, but not until I’m like, five hundred years old. At least.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s how long it takes,” she explains. “The fae don’t get wings or anything even associated with  _ being  _ a fae, powers and all, until then.”

“So why is it happening now?”

“I don’t know, and I’m scared, and I was just trying to clean it up ‘cause I think I’ve stopped bleeding, but—”

“Okay, calm down,” he assures. He’s not even calm himself, but it feels like the right thing to say, He’s technically the adult here even if it doesn’t feel like it, and there’s no one else to turn to indefinitely. Everyone else has bigger fish to fry, and calling Dimara is pointless. They’re far away, now, and what is she going to do? This is out of her territory too.

“Are you in pain?”

“When I woke up,” she admits. “I couldn’t sleep through it. It doesn’t hurt so much anymore.”

“Alright. Just stay here.”

Rory heads downstairs for every spare towel hidden away in the other bathroom’s closet and brings the entire stack up with Bagel trailing him, almost nervously. No wonder he wasn’t with Kelsea last night; Rory doesn’t blame him.

He leaves the stack of towels outside the door, safely away from the blood trails all over the floor, and then grabs the first relatively matching items of clothes he sees from Kelsea’s room.

“It’s not supposed to be happening now,” she says quietly, arms wrapped around herself, upon his return. He leaves the clothes outside the door too. “I don’t understand why it is.”

“You don’t think Shirin has something to do with it, do you?” he asks. “When he healed you, or with the resurrection thing? Clearly something happened with Nadir… you don’t think he could have messed up your timeline too, or whatever?”

“Maybe.” She shrugs. “I guess so.”

That has to be it. No other equation adds up properly. Shirin is going down the list of them and devoting time, accidentally or not, to fucking each and every one of them up. Nadir was the unfortunate first, and now Kelsea is taking the brunt of it instead. Just as they’re about to fix one problem, another one arises.

He’s not sure this is a problem, exactly. Right now it definitely looks like one. He hands Kelsea one of the largest towels for herself and then wipes a spot on the floor clean, leaving it for her to stand on.

Cleaning this up is going to take a while. It’s a good thing Dimara taught him how to do laundry.

“Just sit down,” he suggests.

“I can do it.”

“You can, but you’re not going to.” Rory leans over to the tub’s edge and wipes down a section of it, waiting until she sits down. It’s not really of much use when she hasn’t yet gotten it all off herself, but it looks slightly better.

It’s awful, awful silence. She looks horrified, at herself or the screw up of a timeline. He’s not sure. To his credit Rory tries to ignore it and dutifully keeps Bagel safely outside of the bathroom door while he wipes away all of the mess on the floor, and then moves onto the sink. The tub is sort of the glaringly obvious elephant in the room; it looks like she sat in there for a while to contain it and ended up failing miserably.

He leaves her to get dressed, or at least re-dressed, while he takes his newly drenched armful of towels downstairs and ends up covered in blood as a result of it. Bagel stares at him the whole while, apparently unwilling to go into the bathroom without direct encouragement. Rory feels the same about the situation, only he doesn’t have a choice.

Kelsea has returned to the tub when he gets back, though it appears she’s wiped down most of the blood from one end and that’s where she sits now, knees drawn up to her chest.

“Are you going to stay in there?” he asks.

“I don’t know if it’s going to get worse again,” she tells him. “I’d rather be in here if it did.”

Rather than trail her blood around the house. She doesn’t say it, but he hears it. He urges Bagel into the bathroom and the dog looks up at the edge of the tub expectantly until Kelsea drops one of her hands over it to scratch at his head.

“It’s not like we have any way to get there, but you could talk to Shirin?” he offers. It’s not as if getting in contact with him as ever been Rory’s first priority; the guy creeps him out. Shirin creeps everyone out, to be fair. It’s just how he operates.

They can’t get there, and Shirin probably doesn’t even own a phone knowing him, but someone does, surely. Camden? As if Blair, or anyone for that matter, has Camden’s phone number and is willing to share it with him.

It’s unlikely, is all he’s saying.

“He doesn’t even know what’s happening with Nadir, remember?” Kelsea reminds him. “If he doesn’t know what happened there he’s not going to know about this, either.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Well, he freaks me out.” She shudders. Rory understand that feeling.

“So, no Shirin,” he says. “Is there anything else I can do?”

Kelsea shakes her head and wraps both arms around her knees, too. When she leans forward her new shirt is still clean all the way through. He can’t even imagine what it’s going to look like when the day is done. Wings, of all things. That sure is normal.

For the fae it is, though. For Kelsea it would become normal in a rough three hundred and fifty more years or so. Not now.

“My parents don’t even have them,” she says quietly. “They didn’t when I left, anyway.”

Her parents, hundreds of years older than her, better and wiser and all-knowing except for this instance, anyway. Kids aren’t supposed to have the experience first; that’s sort of the point of parents altogether. To teach, to warn, to love and care for.

“You think your siblings would be jealous?”

She laughs nervously. “Totally.”

“Is there anyone you could talk to?”

“Maybe. The elders in the colony might know. I just don’t know if they want me back. It’s been a while.”

“You’re one of them. They’d take you back. For good, though?”

“No, no,” she says in a rush. “I’m not leaving. I want to stay with you guys.”

He knew that. They all know that. Kelsea could have gone back dozens of times the past few months when things got rough and she’s refused to run. She’s one of the people with the easiest escape plans, save for him. They could both disappear, into the woods and the water, and never come back.

“I’ll think about it,” she murmurs. He knew what he was suggesting when the words came out of his mouth, but now it’s really settling in. They’re not supposed to leave. The woods aren’t safe, no matter if she came from them or not. Things  _ other  _ than the fae live in there, evil and twisted things.

But he said it, so curse his big, stupid mouth apparently. He just can’t help himself.

It gets him into trouble more often than he thought it could.

—

—

—

They spend half the day in that bathroom.

Most of it, even. It’s evening by the time either of them leave for good.

Rory leaves Kelsea in the tub for the most part because he doesn’t want to bug her or risk hurting her. She seems to be telling the truth about the pain level, but sometimes she stretches and winces. She constantly moves positions and he constantly pulls her out a ways to make sure she’s not bleeding.

They’re growing, that’s for sure. What started out as translucent little nothings have grown to wings half the length of her back, and they’re not done just yet.

They look just like that - nothing. Certainly not strong enough to hold her weight or have any important meaning, but they do. That’s just what the Fae are. They look like nothing dangerous or weighty at all.

It’s like watching a science experiment, or at least what he thinks watching one would be like. He doesn’t know any better. He can see every little vein and dip in it, can pinpoint where they would bend and fold to tuck neatly against her back. She could go out in public tomorrow and walk the streets of Portland; no one would be any the wiser.

Several hours later, once she’s allowed him to clean the worst of the tub so she’s not sitting in her own blood, he brings Dimara’s laptop into the bathroom. Kelsea gives him a peculiar look when he settles down on the floor, using one of the only clean towels left as a seat, but doesn’t comment.

And that’s how they spend the day. He sits on the floor and does research, whatever that even means, and routinely gets up to switch the loads between the washer and dryer. He brings her snacks and drinks every time he asks if she’s ready to get out, to which it’s always a firm no.

He had this research plan all along, but not for this reason. Ideally while everyone was gone he wanted more information on Clearson and the demons, whatever information he could find. Now he’s deep in the ugly mysteries of finding out why Kelsea is the only one of her kind to start sprouting wings out of nowhere.

Shirin is a curse, quite literally. He does things because they ask but has no real idea of the repercussions, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

And now they’ve spent most of the day in the bathroom, and he’s halfway ignoring Celia because he has no idea what to tell her beyond a cheery  _ we’re good!  _ which is a complete and total lie.

He’s transparent, alright? He’s not good at lying to her, even through text.

“You know what I just realized?” Kelsea asks him. They’ve been silent for so long he jolts and nearly knocks the laptop to the floor. “I don’t even know, like… how to. Fly, I mean.”

“What, it doesn’t come naturally?” he asks, unsure if he’s more sarcastic or serious. She’s like a newborn baby bird, hopping about on the ground and struggling to flap upwards except she won’t get out of the damn bathtub.

She sighs. “Maybe I should just jump off the roof.”

“You are not jumping off the roof.”

That’s what he needs, right? For everyone to get home with a possible baby in tow to find Kelsea splattered all over the driveway.

He’s cleaned up enough blood today, thank you very much.

He starts to look that up, instead, feeling like an absolute lunatic googling things about how to fly and what to do in this situation, to which no one has any concrete answers for. It’s not as if the Fae look to write informational articles once they learn.

Some time later, absolutely no progress made, Kelsea leans over the edge of the tub and props her head up on it. “You don’t have to stay in here, you know.”

“I know.” That’s all he says. He knows he could have spent the day in the living room doing the exact same thing, but that wouldn’t have stopped Kelsea from sitting in the tub all day. It just would have separated them.

He’s already established that he doesn’t like being alone. 

She’s still peering at him over the edge of the tub. Rory finally gives up his fruitless search and closes the laptop, leaning back against the wall to look at her.

“Hungry?” he asks her. She nods, minisculely, guilt flashing through her eyes. They must both be getting tired, him of running food up and down the stairs throughout the day and her of eating it in the bathtub only.

“I think they might be done,” she says. Done is an odd word. It’s like she put something in the oven and it’s finished baking, except it’s something protruding from her back.

He trusts her judgement more than his own; she knows what they’re supposed to look like, after all, and the twilight hour settling in through the window isn’t helping much.

“I’ll make dinner,” he offers, getting to his feet. He stretches out all of the aches and pains from camping out on the bathroom floor, bending down one last time to scoop the laptop off the floor. “But if you’re okay, you should come downstairs. Staying in there can’t be good for you.”

She smiles. Just barely, but it’s enough to count as one. “I will. Thanks.”

He waits, but she doesn’t move. He grabs the last towel to hang back up on the way out and heads downstairs. This time Bagel stays behind, presumably to wait for Kelsea. At the bottom of the stairs he hears the familiar noise of something squeaking against the porcelain tub.

Rory isn’t meant to be doing this. He’s not exactly the type to know how to cook a proper meal, or when to precisely change the laundry over. At least the blood doesn’t seem to have stained.

Kelsea has yet to come down, but he can hear her moving about, almost as if she’s getting used to standing again. It must be an odd feeling, to be able to fly but to have to walk instead. He gets that same one. In the water he can do anything, be stronger than ever, have everything at the reach of his fingertips without any effort at all.

And here he barely knows how to turn the stove on.

He has to, though, because he’s something else but he’s also human, now, and being human involves acting like one too.

Kelsea said it, and he still feels it. He’s not going anywhere.

He doesn’t want to.

—

—

—

They end up eating cereal for dinner after Rory, miraculously, ends up burning two grilled cheese nearly to ash.

At least there’s no one about to complain. Kelsea works her way through one bowl in silence, holding herself awkwardly in her chair, and then pours another one that’s only half full and shovels that one down as well.

It took her a minute to get down here, but she’s learned how to… put them away, for lack of a better term. He can’t even tell the wings are there. She’s tucked them up against her back and lined them up with her spine in such a way that you never would be unless she told you.

She ends up stealing his cereal bowl before he can wash it, and he lets her clean all four items in the sink because she seems so determined to do so.

It gives him time to head outside, either, sitting at the end of the bench on the front porch.

There, he calls Anya.

She answers as quick as always, in mere seconds. It’s as if she’s constantly waiting for something, expecting another voice to come to her. The Valkyrie intuition seems to have spread to every little part of her life and given her tools that no one else has access to.

“”What’s up?” she answers. “Long time, no talk.”

Not that long, really. Two weeks at the very most, though he has difficulty keeping track of his conversations, her and Tavian both. He likes them both, maybe more than he should considering he’s never really properly met them. Only Celia has. It’s her judgement he’s relying on in this scenario; if she likes them, then they must be okay to speak to on a semi-regular basis.

“Just wanted someone to talk to,” he tells her.

“Not enough people up at the funny farm for you to do that with?”

It sounds like a dig, and anyone else would think it was one, but half of what Anya says sounds mean but actually isn’t. If she wanted to be directly mean to him, she would be.

Maybe it’s  _ because  _ they haven’t met. He earns nice points from her because she’s too concerned with getting on the case of someone she’s never spoken to face to face.

“They’re all gone, actually,” he explains. “It’s just Kelsea and I up here.”

“Where’s everyone else?”

He goes over the stories in as little detail as possible initially, but she eventually pries the remaining pieces out of him anyway. She already knows the things that matter, but whistles lowly at the thought of the baby actually  _ happening  _ as if him telling her repeatedly over the past few months did nothing in the long run.

She doesn’t seem to have much to comment on besides, that. She accepts Tanis at her parents house with exactly no fanfare, though makes a curious noise at the thought of Celia being there with her. It seems everyone knows just how uncommon it is for Celia to leave him alone.

Anya has the direct experience of knowing he almost got himself killed the last time he properly left her, all because they argued.

He lets her talk for a while, too. Unfortunately Anya isn’t the best storyteller, admittedly so, but neither is he. She tends to jump around a lot, skipping from one thing to the next as if she never started speaking about the former. One minute it will be about where she went for lunch and the next she’ll be delving into the complicated inner workings of Tavian’s brain and judging his daily decisions as if she doesn’t participate in half of them actively.

She never talks about what she does. The whole business of almost accidentally saving lives has to be complicated, and she probably doesn’t have them still calling her months later.

Telling her about Dimara, at least after the fact, made him feel much better about himself. When Anya had saved him she had said it leaned towards happening to the people that deserve it the least, the ones who weren’t meant to go. Dimara’s death made him feel as if his insides had knotted together, because had hadn’t deserved it at all. Of everyone that should have been saved from death, Dimara was at the top of the list.

It turns out Anya isn’t a god-send, not the way you’d think. And even she can’t fix everything. She said she would have tried if she had known.

To think they really haven’t seen each other face to face. He ought to.

“I just wanted to hear someone else’s voice,” he admits. He can’t even recall what story she’s in the middle of, as guilty as it makes him feel. “I’m not used to only having Kelsea.”

“So you called me? What about Celia?”

“I don’t think it would be good to talk to her right now.”

“Why not?” she asks. He has a number of answers for that himself, but none seem particularly, overwhelmingly good. Sure, she could help with Kelsea about as much as anyone else could, but she would come back home and be there for them both.

Maybe it’s just the wings. Celia is never going to get hers back, not by some miracle.

“Something happened today,” he tells her. “Not… not bad, I don’t think. We’ll see. But the thought of explaining it to her just isn’t appealing.”

“It’s not like it was your fault.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it’s  _ you _ .” Anya scoffs. “When you’re sad it’s like someone kicked a puppy. What sort of trouble could you of all people get up to?”

He sighs. “Again, you don’t know that.”

He can’t see it, but the shrug is something he can imagine all too clearly, when he can’t envision anything else. “I just think I’m right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.”

“I’d prefer not to.”

He just wants to be  _ safe _ . He wants a normal day where absolutely nothing happens and no babies are randomly or prematurely born and where no one sprouts  _ wings  _ out of their back like that’s just a commonplace event.

Rory knew this would happen, in a secret, locked away place inside of him. The day he stood on two feet for the first time was bloody and ugly and deep down he knew every other day was going to be no different.

“Do you want me to come up there?” Anya asks. It’s the first time she’s ever offered so directly.

“I don’t think you can. The shield is still up.”

“I’ll fist-fight that shield and win, just you watch.

“Me too!” Tavian crows distantly in the background. It’s enough to bring a smile to his face, the clear image of these two people he knows so well but also doesn’t, struggling to break through to him on the other side.

And they would. He has no doubt.

Kelsea pokes her head out onto the front porch where he’s sheltering, observing curiously. There’s no way it took her that long to do the dishes; she was giving him space. It’s nice to not feel as if he has to be stuck in the bathroom anymore.

“We’re okay,” he tells her, hoping it’s true. 

“If you need me, let me know,” Anya offers. “I’ll get through one way or another.”

“I will. Talk to you soon?”

“Always. Bye.”

She really can put a smile on his face. Tavian calls a cheerful goodbye at him from far away even though Anya doesn’t.

He’s alone again, with Kelsea. She’s still staring at him. It doesn’t feel as weighty as before.

“I had an idea,” she says, not wasting a second.

“Shoot.”

“You remember what I said earlier, right? About how I’m not supposed to have wings or any sort of fanatical powers until I’m much older?”

“Vividly,” he admits. The blood is still at the forefront of his mind, but he remembers that part too. That had been part of why the experience was so alarming.

“Do you think,” she says slowly. “Do you think if the wings happened this early, then everything else did too?”

“I don’t follow.”

“The powers!” she crows excitedly. “You know, like, ultimate power over the earth and the grass and the trees and everything else.”

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Well, I can’t. Or maybe I can.” She frowns, looking at the meadow before the house with an odd intensity. Rory can already see where this is going and suddenly wishes he was blind more than anything else. Nobody could blame him for it if he couldn’t see to understand.

“Kelsea,” he starts.

“I’m gonna try.” She practically skips off the porch and down the drive, making a quick, narrow path into the grass, bare feet and all.

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” he shouts after her, though gets up and makes to follow without hesitation. He scoops up Bagel on the way, who was clearly planning his own route through the meadow after her judging by the look in his eyes. If he’s being honest, and he is, he’s not in the mood to accidentally sacrifice the dog to Kelsea tearing the world apart.

If she can, anyway.

“Kels, I’m serious,” he tries, but she isn’t at all deterred. He clutches Bagel tighter; his eyes widen and go just as big as Rory’s are.

“I’m not going to do anything,” she insists, crouching down in the grass. It certainly looks like she’s going to do something, if she even knows how. She presses a palm to the earth, brushing away the longest strands of grass in her way until she can dig her fingers into the dirt. She looks around - at the trees, and wildflowers, and the greenery that is returning everywhere around them, and closes her eyes.

Nothing happens, though Rory feels no inclination to move closer. He stays back a firm twenty feet and watches as if she’s a bomb and she’s about ready to explode.

Bagel sighs. So does Rory. “Kels, seriously—”

The ground begins to shake under his feet.

It’s no great movement, only the faintest tremor, but he stumbles anyway and backs up to the road without thinking, nothing but the shock taking over his every moveent.

Bagel lets out a high-pitched, sharp bark directly into his ear, and he doesn’t even flinch.

Rory has much more pressing problems.

Kelsea opens her eyes, leaving her hand pressed to the dirt. “Oh my God,” she laughs. “Oh my God, is this real? This is real!”

It’s real. The ground is shaking under his feet, faintly, as if the beginning of an earthquake is about to come down on them all, but nothing more is happening than that. He watches her dig her fingers in further and the vibrations grow stronger as if in response, listening to a silent cue only they could possibly understand.

He opens his mouth, to either yell or warn her off, whatever happens first, and she lifts her hand up. The earth isn’t only one reading cues that way.

When she lifts her hand, the shaking stops all at once. He can still feel the vibrations in his feet.

Kelsea turns on him, slowly, and then spins to face him. The exuberance is written all over her face, in her wide smile and gleaming eyes.

“That was you,” he says quietly. “And that was real.”

Her answering laugh is resoundingly happy, so happy that he has nothing in him willing to crush it. He hasn’t seen joy like that on her face in a time period only described as  _ forever _ . There’s a chance he’s never seen it at all.

This is the same girl who was covered in her own blood for most of the day, curled up with her knees to her chest in the bathtub to avoid spreading it around the house.

It’s not the same person at all, he realizes. He just watched evolution happen right before his eyes.

There’s something horrifying about it but it’s beautiful, too. The girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly, who never would, could kill him right now if she really wanted to. But she’s not. She’s just laughing, laughing and smiling like it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to her.

Rory doesn’t know if it is. If it possibly could be. He can imagine what everyone else will say and think, how the reactions will file in one after the other. If it keeps her like this, though, Rory doesn’t care. This overjoyed youthfulness of someone who could hardly hold onto either is worth the acceptance of something so strange.

He knows that because it’s what he’s so desperately looking for.

And if Kelsea can have that, then maybe he can, too.

—

—

—

They’re outside for hours.

Rory’s hope for an early bedtime and easy sleep does not come at all easily, because it’s just shy of two in the morning and they have yet to return to the house.

At least he managed to put Bagel inside the house without so much as a fight, because he had seemed as eager to get away from the ruckus as Rory wishes he could have. Kelsea also isn’t paying much attention to what he is and isn’t doing, or else she may have protested.

But you know, she’s too busy messing with the earth around them.

It’s nothing monumental, if the earth shaking can be considered something that doesn’t matter. He can sense though that it  _ could  _ be monumental if only she really tried; there’s no one here for her to aim it at, though, and so for the most part she keeps it quiet.

Quiet, it turns out, is just short of pulling trees from the earth just by looking at them.

It’s unsettling, is all.

Kelsea always had that thing about her, where flowers almost seemed to grow wherever she walked, but this is much worse. This is the grass either growing tenfold or withering straight to death underneath her hovering hand, the roots of the trees pulling out of the ground at her command, the dirt shifting and moving as if it’s turned to water.

He’s not fearful of it just yet because like he said, she hasn’t turned it back on him, and she wouldn’t. He hopes, anyway. Being on Kelsea’s good side has turned out to be more beneficial in the long run than he ever could have thought.

Rory is content to sit out there with her, to suggest things and to carefully observe like he’s holding her under a magnifying glass, but only for so long. It finally ticks over to nearly three, and then at the same time it starts raining.

It’s nothing more than a drizzle, at first just a few drops that turns into a light, misty rain. Kelsea doesn’t even bat an eye and continues on with whatever she’s doing. Making a hole in the ground without touching it? Looks that way.

“Can we go inside now?” he calls. “We’ll pick up in the morning.”

Rory doesn’t know how much longer he can sit here, whether it’s now or once the sun has come up, if it comes up at all.

Kelsea hardly hears him. Her head tilts in his direction to knowledge it, much like Bagel’s would. She plucks a fully grown daisy free from the meadow and tucks it behind her ear.

No flowers had grown just yet, before. Only weeds.

They’re close to the edge of the shield, too, as far as they can get from the house and as close to the trees as they can manage. He’s almost glad that for now she can’t get any closer, because then the trees will start to grow to unnatural heights or they’ll fall over right before his eyes, and he’s not ready for that just yet.

The rain comes down harder. Rory gets to his feet and trods through the sodden grass closer to her, trying to ignore the rifts that have been created with dirt. They’re filling up with water faster than before.

“Kelsea,” he urges. He gets her excitement, and furthermore doesn’t want to be the one to crush it, but he also has little desire to get sick after spending too much unnecessary time out in the rain. Some newfound powers won’t have any effect or help in that regard.

“Just give me a minute.”

He’s still bigger than her, he reminds herself. Much bigger. If she refuses for much longer he’s going to march over there and sling her over his shoulder. So what if she wants to bring a tree down on him - he’ll let her. They’ll both go under it.

And that minute rapidly turns into two, and then three. He sighs, raising a hand above his head to ward off the worst of the downpour.

All at once, the rain stops.

He blinks water from his eyelashes and looks up. It hasn’t  _ stopped _ . It’s as if a smaller shield has been placed overtop of them both and the rain is pattering off of it, sliding off the edge of the dome and into the grass ten feet in every direction. Inside it’s abnormally quiet, surrounded by the thundering of the outside world.

It’s like they’re in a bubble.

Kelsea turns around, slowly. The daisy behind her ear now as a companion, but the flower in her hand is unrecognizable, so dark blue it’s almost black. It looks like the ocean.

He gives her a peculiar look. “What are you doing?”

“That’s not me,” she says. “What are  _ you  _ doing?”

Nothing at all. He drops his hand. The rain comes roaring down again as if their little bubble never existed at all, drenching them both in a few quick seconds.

Kelsea blinks. “Do it again.”

“Do what again?”

“Your hand. Put it back up.”

He listens, obediently. For some reason. The rain continues hammering down though, around his outstretched hand, and collects in his palm when he raises it back up.

“No, no,” Kelsea insists. “Do it  _ again _ . Whatever you were thinking the first time. Put some intent behind it.”

“I just wanted it to  _ stop _ ,” he mutters, not seeing the difference.

And then it does.

It stops again. Their little bubble, the safe haven that had existed for a few seconds, it returns. It stretches just behind him and past Kelsea, enclosing them both in the only dry space that must exist for miles.

“Oh my God,” she breathes. “That’s you.”

“There’s no way—”

“It’s you!” she repeats. “It has to be you, it stopped because you put your hand up.”

Which seems… almost sensible, really, until you think about how not sensible it is. Kelsea is one thing. This was going to happen to her one day regardless.

It’s not supposed to happen to him. It’s just water, and it’s not supposed to react to him, unless…

Unless it always did. He lived down there, within it, for years. It wasn’t so much that they controlled the water that it flowed around them, urged them to their next destination. That’s just how he was born, though. Now that he’s on the ground, never quite surrounded by it, the very same thing should not be happening, and definitely not in the form of the rain falling from the sky.

It can’t be just the rain. The rain fills lakes and rivers, makes the ocean rise.

That means it’s everything.

Kelsea is laughing again, filling the otherwise deafeningly silent space, and then lunges forward to wrap her arms around him. It knocks him off balance long enough for his hand to fall, just the slightest curl of his fingers, and the rain comes down again.

All because of the lift and fall of his hand.

It was him. There’s no denying it.

Kelsea squeezes him. “This is incredible.”

“That Shirin messed us both up?” He’s not even sure that’s the truth.

“Did he, though?”

Again, it’s back to the truth. Chances are that whatever Shirin did really messed with Kelsea, somehow, but who knows what happened with him. An issue or two with a timeline wouldn’t unlock something in him that never existed.

Which brings him back to his previous point: it existed inside him all along.

Kelsea has her family, the possibility of answers, but Rory isn’t sure he’ll be afforded the same luxury. Everyone he once knew is gone, dead or far, far away.

There are no answers for him, he knows certainly.

He’s on his own with this one.

Despite that, though, what Kelsea said feels somehow true. It’s messed up, no doubt, but is  _ he _ ? He doesn’t think so.

“No,” he decides. “No, he didn’t.”

—

—

—

So they don’t really go inside.

Not for a long while, anyway.

By the time they do they’re drenched, like two matching, drowned rats. Kelsea refuses to let him go anywhere near the house so as long as it’s raining.

It’s just shy of eight when it finally stops. And then he goes to sleep. Or he tries, at least.

It  _ is _ him. The rain listened to him like the earth listened to Kelsea, like it knew who it belonged to and who had control of it all along. It flowed around his fingers effortlessly, like all he had to do was think about where it should go and then it would.

Once it had stopped, Kelsea had tried to continue it. Despite her efforts he hadn’t given in - the rain was one thing, but if he could lift it out of the puddles without touching it and move it all around them his brain might just melt down.

Ignoring the fact that it already is. For the second night in a row he hardly gets any sleep, and it’s no fault of going to bed by the time the sun had risen.

The early morning is troubling for several reason. Despite the lack of sleep Kelsea is up ridiculously early, and he feels the need to keep alert to make sure she doesn’t so much as step onto the front porch. She doesn’t, to his knowledge. There’s the issue of the sun, too. Now that the clouds have dissipated it’s risen full force and is streaming directly through the lone window into the bedroom over the bed, dappling sunlight over his face.

He sleeps on and off for a while but is finally forced to call it quits when he loses it for good. The cell phone they’ve been left is dead, as it has been since late last night. He’d rather it be dead than unusable because he brought it out into the rain, but he plugs it in regardless and brushes aside the window curtains. This sun is hovering overhead, right at its highest point. Noon, then, or just after.

He waits until the phone is juiced up enough to turn on and watches all of the text messages ping in, one after the other. All of them are from either Celia or Kali, the context wildly different. Most of Celia’s sound infuriated even through a screen, the words bleeding rising temperament. She’s upset that he’s not answering her - that’s fair.

Kali’s are less than descriptive and share no real news. He waits for more to load on-screen, but none follow after the one that says she’ll text when they’re headed back. She hasn’t yet sent said message.

He hesitates over Celia’s name. If he calls, at her request, she’s going to ask why he didn’t call sooner or answer any of her messages at all. She’ll ask him about his day, what they did yesterday.

He doesn’t know what he would say. The truth seems like the obvious answer, but he’s not ready for that yet.

Rory isn’t ready for  _ any  _ of it, really. Having power over something, especially something as strong as this, wasn’t meant to be for him. It wasn’t in the cards, definitely couldn’t have been something Tanis ever saw in her visions.

It could have been, and there’s a chance he’s wrong, but he doesn’t think this was supposed to happen at all.

No one else will care the way he does. They either will be fully accepting or as enthused as Kelsea was and still probably is at the prospect of it. He’s going to learn how to deal with it. They’re going to be happy for him.

So why isn’t he?

It’s the weight of it all, he thinks. There were times before when all he would feel was guilt at not being able to protect himself, at things happening around him and being nothing more than a bystander to it all. A fence could kill him, if he tripped over his own feet. Dimara with something else in control could slash his face open and he could do nothing to stop it.

Now he  _ could _ but he still doesn’t know how. Eventually people will expect things of him and he won’t know how to handle that either.

Kelsea passes by his door, eventually, and knocks him right out of his own thoughts, but she doesn’t enter his room. She pauses in the hall, listening for any signs of wakefulness, but he doesn’t give her any. The door is only open a crack in the opposite direction; she has no chance of seeing him.

Whether or not she gives up he’s not sure, or if she was really trying to accomplish anything at all. She leaves his door and closes the one to the bathroom. Two or three minutes later the shower turns on.

He’s surprised for two reasons: one, that she’s using that bathroom at all, and two that she’s showering after spending so long in what was essentially one outside last night.

He’s not in a position to judge.

Rory isn’t alone for long after, for Bagel nudges open his door with a single paw and then trots in, clearly looking for some attention now that he’s been left to his own devices. There’s no way Kelsea hasn’t fed him and let him out at least once by now, but he’s still the adult here and feels obligated to check.

Besides, it’s a few minutes of peace in which no one is going to talk to him, and Bagel can’t.

It’s the little victories.

The phone’s only gone up to twelve percent, and it’s up to fourteen by the time he struggles into some clothes, but he pulls it from the charger and pockets it anyway. It’s better to be safe than sorry, regardless of who he isn’t answering. That being everyone, for the time being.

Bagel follows him all the way downstairs and to the front door as if he’s never been outside in his life, little legs practically thrumming with excitement. Rory takes a good, hard look around and then opens the door. The dog bolts, predictably, but he knows not to go too far away without someone in eyesight. He’s not sure who taught him that. Vance, maybe.

Everyone is just better at doing things than him, is the real truth. Rory was never meant to be anything out here other than completely and totally human, nothing supernatural about it at all.

He inches to the edge of the porch. It’s difficult to tell through his shoes, but the wooden stairs are just dark enough that they may still be slightly wet from the rain that went on into the early morning.

There are puddles everywhere, too. The sun hasn’t gotten to them yet. The temptation to reach for them is so high that he’s not even bothering to focus on anything else, no clue where Bagel’s gone except for not very far. As long as the shield is holding he can’t get out, supposedly.

As long as it’s holding, and Rory has no idea that it is. That’s completely up to Tanis and she’s twenty minutes away by vehicle, focusing on other things. How can she still be holding it when she’s not even thinking?

She’s better than him. She knows what she’s doing.

Rory was almost close enough to the puddle to touch, the biggest and widest one just off the porch, but he straightens back up and walks to the edge of the drive. He can’t even see the glamour to know it’s still there, but Bagel is performing circles around the meadow in front of him, paws already damp and muddy. If something really is wrong, he’s certainly not concerned about it.

So what is it, then? Paranoia? The chances that someone saw what happened last night on either of their ends is already minimal because of their isolated location, but what if someone  _ did _ ?

Who would it have been? Clearson? One of the many demons he apparently keeps around?

It could have been anyone.

Rory can’t help but wonder what he would do if someone came at them, right this minute. Kelsea would be none the wiser if she’s still tucked away in the bathroom, and there’s no one else to help him. There are weapons in the house, but he wouldn’t be fast enough to get to them, before he…

Got attacked and likely killed. Pretty deftly murdered. There’s not an equation, at least an accurate one, that ends up to anything other than him dying.

That’s where this is coming from. If something were to happen right this second there would be no good ending for either of them, not unless he learned to control it and could fight back. Him, and his bare hands, and the puddles that he may or may not have any real control over.

He leans down this time with zero hesitation and scoops up a handful of the muddy, brown water, letting it rest in his palm. The puddle isn’t even that shallow, and it’s already warming even further to his skin.

What if he could do anything with it?

“Rory?”

He doesn’t break his gaze away from it. Like Kelsea said last night - he just needs to  _ think _ . It wasn’t just his hand that stopped the rain last night, it was more than that. It was all intention.

Kelsea shifts closer. If Rory focuses he can feel just how close she’s gotten and how much more it would take to break his concentration.

The water begins to move in small increments, first the slightest tremble that could just be a result of his own eternally unsteady feet and then it begins to collect and gather right in the center of his palm. It’s finished result is a small, shimmering orb that seems to rest half a centimeter over the palm of his hand, holding firm in mid-air.

He can feel Kelsea’s smile over his shoulder. “That’s wicked.”

“Yeah,” he decides. “Yeah it is.”

Kelsea reaches a hand up, too, until her own is hovering just above his, the ball of water nestled between them. Her eyebrows knit together and she curls her fingers down, as if trying to push something.

It’s like watching a miracle happen. The dirt clouding the water nestled in his hand begins to sink all the way to the bottom and then falls out into his palm, gentle sprinkles of soil that spread over his skin as he watches.

When he looks back up at the rolling ball of water it’s clear as can be, and he can see right out the other side of it to the meadow beyond.

“No,” he corrects.  _ “That’s  _ wicked.”

Kelsea laughs. “We both are.”

And isn’t that the truth, now? He never would have thought that in his life.

“I think,” she begins. “No, I know now. I want to go talk to my family. They may not have any answers for me but I think I need to.”

“Now?”

“If you want.”

If  _ he  _ wants. He’s being invited along, in some capacity. Certainly not to talk to them himself, they’re in such seclusion for a reason, but be alongside her for most of the journey. They weren’t supposed to leave the house - this is Kelsea’s compromise.

“If you want,” she repeats. “We could make a detour. Go to the water first. Take the main road down to the beach and then cut back up through the woods.”

She knows how to get him. They all do. This isn’t just about him diving in for a quick swim, though, as this now matters so much more.

A text buzzes in on his phone, but it doesn’t appear to tip off Kelsea. Only he feels it hidden inside his pocket, and he ignores it in favor of focusing on the current moment. There are things to weigh. They could wait until everyone else gets back; it shouldn’t be long, now. Tomorrow at the latest, at least until some of them are back. Someone else could go with Kelsea, someone better equipped to deal with literally anything.

Or they could go now. They’re not supposed to, but all of the rules have been thrown out the window. Going could mean him figuring something out. Her, too. Different areas, different things to learn.

And they deserve that, don’t they?

Rory digs in his pocket for the phone, allowing the screen to light up for only a moment. It’s a text from Anya, of all people. Not exactly who he would have put money on.

_ Are you sure you don’t want me to come? _

She would, too. If he asked. Her and Tavian would both come running for someone that could be a stranger in another world to them, all because he worked up the nerve to ask.

Rory hesitates, because he always does. It’s one of the few things he’s good at.

“What do you think?” Kelsea asks.

He types out two words, a simple  _ I’m sure,  _ and hits send. Bagel has come trotting back to them both and circles around their feet until Kelsea opens the door for him and he returns to the safety of the inside.

He powers down the phone. “Let’s go.”

Kelsea beams, smile like sunshine, and skips down the driveway past him. She was already ready to go. He can’t tell if she would have gone without him or not.

The phone before it goes dark is listed at twelve percent, a dangerously low number, but nothing in him wants to leave it at the house. It feels like an insurance policy of sorts. It will still work out there, if he needs it.

But will he, with what they can do now? They’re no masters, but it’s still something.

Rory feels the moment he passes through the shield. It’s always the same, as if the smallest shiver has gone down your spine. Like your body knows something your brain doesn’t. But it will always let him back in, a thought he’s comforted by as he follows Kelsea all the way down the drive and closer to the road.

He hasn’t been to the water in a while, hasn’t allowed himself to even touch the ocean. Distancing himself was difficult, but it was about time he tried. Living a normal, human lifestyle was never going to go the way anyone wanted if he couldn’t.

And now he was what, relapsing? That’s what it felt like. But it felt like it was calling him, too, urging him closer and closer. It wanted him back. It wanted to show something.

It wasn’t just a puddle, the rain falling from the sky. He could have the entire ocean at his fingertips. The house will be safe for a while, and so will everyone else. Nothing will bad happen.

If he thinks it, that’s exactly the way it works. Right?

Just before they leave the house out of sight Rory notices a tree at the edge of the road, spilling over onto the edge of it. It’s branches are warped and cracked, newly grown leaves scattered across the asphalt. It’s not the biggest tree in the surrounding area, but it’s nothing to laugh about either. It would still tower over him.

It wasn’t there last night, that he knows. It wasn’t so much a storm as it was a brief period of rain, a few hours in a month where it did it all the time.

It certainly wasn’t enough to rip a tree from the ground.

He stares at it as they pass, but gains nothing from it. Kelsea skips around and past it like it’s not even there, refusing to even blink at the oddness of it all. She was awake much earlier than him, this morning. He heard her for hours. What are the chances that she wasn’t out here ripping trees from the earth, exactly? There’s nothing else around that could have done it.

He eyes her back, waiting for a reaction, or explanation, but he’s not the type to forcefully ask for once and she isn’t going to tell him otherwise.

She’s just ripping the earth apart. It’s nothing to worry about.

Right?


	3. Going Dark

Near Home.   
April 13th, 1:01pm.

Kelsea has her… things to ponder, you could say.

And there’s quite a few of them.

She had two real reasons for not wanting to leave with everyone else, but only one was ever voiced aloud, and it was arguably the more trivial of them. Someone had to stay with the dog, after all. Just because he had spent so many days cooped up in a backpack and a car, respectively, did not mean he had to live the rest of his life like that.

Sure, Rory had volunteered. Everyone had volunteered to stay in some capacity unless their reasons to go outweighed it.

She was one of the two that stayed, though. No one had thought twice about it except for perhaps Vance; she had asked so many times to go into the city to meet Farren that not taking up the invitation now looked suspicious.

Or at least it would have, if she was anyone but herself. No one thought she was capable of raising such suspicion.

She has her reason, though. Her  _ real  _ reason.

It’s odd to have such blind loyalty to people she hadn't seen in months, to people who had refused to accept her new way of life and the fact that she wanted to leave at all.

They were her family, though. It wasn’t as if she could turn her back on them so easily.

The fact of the matter was, there were things out there. One had been in the woods before, months go. Another could appear at a moment’s notice. The chances that the colony  _ couldn’t  _ handle itself were slim, but she couldn’t trust chances alone. They had no idea what was going on out here. If something wanted them dead, it would try, and it might just succeed.

So Kelsea couldn’t go. It was as simple as that.

Most of the colony was younger, younger meaning that they were five hundred or below and had no real way of defending themselves. They didn’t teach much beyond the basics of self-defense because they had no reason to; if you never came out of the woods, there was little reason to. The elders, only a handful of them, would be trusted to protect every member of the population, and they would be the ones targeted first.

Kelsea knew them all by name, had spent years of time with them. Losing them now would prove how little sense still existed in the world.

And of course it wasn’t just them. It was her parents, and her siblings who would correctly be so jealous of her now, and her friends. There were so many people out there that needed to be protected.

Kelsea could do that for them now, if the time came. She wouldn’t hesitate.

Something like a demon would stand no chance.

Clearson was more difficult, or whatever he was going by now. They still hadn’t figured that one out.

She was determined to. Chances are it wouldn’t happen on her own, but now she could be an integral part of the process that ultimately  _ did.  _

She never actually goes to sleep. Rory does, and she waits until long after he’s gone silent up in his and Celia’s shared room in order to creep back outside. As long as she stays around the house, she’s safe.

But then she begins to test the boundaries. It’s one thing to be able to control the earth directly underneath your palm, to be able to dig your fingers into the bark of a tree and make roots rip from the ground.

It was another entirely to watch it from a distance.

Despite the shield being present you could still see beyond it, as if it was a one-way mirror. No one outside of it could see anything she was doing or anything at all besides what Tanis wanted them to see - the burned out, wrecked shell of a house several months gone now. The charred scent of ash would no longer even be present.

She’s standing on one side when she focuses and the trees rips out of the ground, clear on the other side, all the way down the main drive.

It’s a saying, so she’s learned in the past few months. It doesn’t make much sense to her. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

And the answer is a resounding  _ yes.  _ It does, and it always will. The tree outside of the glamour isn’t even yet fully grown but it topples over as if the non-existent wind finally got too strong for its feeble roots and thuds into the ground. Even if she wasn’t here, it would still fall the same. The noise would still occur.

It had been sort of a funny thing to do when no one was watching. There would never be any real proof that her hands had done it considering she had never actually touched it. All she had done was look and it had just… fallen. Like that.

Rory knows, though. When they both leave the house and make their way to the road she doesn’t turn to watch his changing expression, but his footsteps slow as they pass it. She can imagine his turned head, the peculiar gleam in his eyes as he wonders, and then figures it out.

He’s not stupid, after all. Neither is she. People thinking they are works to their advantage.

That was another saying, too - it’s the quiet ones you have to look out for.

No one would suspect this from them. Even the most perceptive people wouldn’t wager on them leaving the house’s boundaries at all, let alone to travel all the way down to the beach and then back up through the woods to the place her family called home. It wasn’t safe, they would argue. Sensible people such as Rory and Kelsea wouldn’t make such an outlandish, dangerous decision.

But they were dangerous too, now. She would go if she wanted to, and right now there wasn’t even someone to stop her.

Rory had readily agreed. He was still walking a pace behind her, allowing her full reign of the shoulder, maybe half a foot wide. The ditch to their left was a wide, downward slope, and it was half-filled with water. It never got much higher than that.

She glances back a few times. Most of them he’s staring at the water down in the ditch, and if his eyes aren’t there he’s focused resolutely on the ground between his feet and keeping a straight path alongside the road’s final line.

Rory is quiet, a lot, but not this quiet. He’s good at conversation, but he can listen too. Right now there’s none of either.

Kelsea can understand that in a world where she finds she doesn’t understand much. She had come to terms with the fact that she would gain powers one day, wings too, but this may never have happened to him at all. He certainly didn’t expect it to. The minimal preparation her brain had for this moment was enough to ground here when it happened.

It looks like when she shook the ground she shook a bit of his brain, too.

The beach is quietly deserted. It’s a peaceful, easy Friday afternoon and most people are either stuck in school or equally stuck at their jobs. They have the luxury of coming down here whenever they like.

The few people walking around pay them little mind, but they still head further down the beach and even past the pier she had sat on so long ago, looking down at Rory in the water below. They make it all the way to the rocks, where both the sand and any easily traversable paths disappear and everything becomes more difficult to navigate.

Rory hops up onto one of the rocks, smooth and flat along the top. “So what are we doing, exactly?”

She’s not entirely sure herself. As much as she loathes to admit any sort of trickery being tied to this it was a least half a ploy, her coming up with this. Rory would be more inclined to come with her if she offered up something first. To him the ocean was like gold. To his newfound abilities it might be more than that.

“For you to try some things?” she guesses, glancing around. They’ve left all of the people behind, and any houses behind them are far up the dunes and at least fifty yards back into the trees.

No one can see them, now.

“Like what?”

Something beyond the magical possibilities of a puddle, in the very least. Perhaps they should have started with a river, though, or even a lake. The ocean seems kind of daunting.

The stream that passes right by and then through the colony seems far away, now. They’re already here.

“Well, you should stay out, for one,” she figures. “You’ve got enough control of the water when you’re in it, so…”

“So?”

“I’m not the expert here.”

“What if I cause a tsunami or something?”

“Pretty sure that would be me, not you,” she reminds him. That would mean she’d have to cause a dramatic enough earthquake to spread all the way out deep into the ocean and shift the earth itself, far below the surface. With that the entire Cape would be gone and a chunk of the upper eastern coast destroyed, all because she did something a little  _ too  _ well.

“You’re not the destructive type,” she says. “We both know that. I’m not sure you could do anything that bad if you even tried.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you think you could?” he asks. They’re in a good position to know each other and not be scared, which is relieving. She could give him plenty of reason to be.

“I don’t think so,” she decides, quicker than she expected. “Maybe if it was Clearson, or if I really  _ had  _ to, but besides that…”

“That’s what I thought too,” he murmurs, but she can’t tell if it sounds like the full truth. “I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

He crouches down on the rock he seems to have claimed, hovering above the water. It’s rippling enough up onto the shore that she can’t get a good, accurate read on his reflection. She imagines he looks confused; it’s a look he’s had down pat since late last night.

At least this time it’s not directed at her, because of something she did.

“You didn’t know what you were doing the first time, either,” she points out. “Maybe you don’t have to. You know how Dimara has that weird, freaky intuition whenever one of us is doing something stupid? Maybe it’s like that.”

“Intuition,” he says, unimpressed. “For the water?”

Well, he’s from the water. He should definitely have more intuition than the rest of them when it comes to such things.

“Just think about you want to do and then see if it happens.”

Rory sighs, leaning down to scoop up a handful of the ocean water, cupping it in both hands. He stares at it for a moment and then lets it run between both of hands, until it splatters the rock underneath.

He’s thinking about something. She can’t, or maybe doesn’t, want to know just yet.

Kelsea perches on the edge of the rock, sure not to make contact with him or effect his concentration. He’s not doing anything, is the issue. Just staring out over the ocean and watching, eyebrows knitted together.

Or maybe he is doing something.

She keeps an eye on everything she can: the water and where it stops every-time a wave comes up the sand, the height of it at the bottom of the pier in the distance, the individual height of each swell as it comes in.

The water starts to recede as Kelsea watches, maybe three or four inches. No longer does it come anywhere close to lapping at her shoes. At this point it’s just barely touching the rock they’re both on.

“Like I said,” Rory says calmly. “Tsunami.”

“Still not how it works,” she quips. It does sort of look like one, though. Slower and less incremental, but the water is steadily getting further and further away from the shore with each passing second.

Maybe the movies are wrong. Maybe it always looks like this.

As long as Kelsea keeps to herself and doesn’t cause the earth to shake, nothing will ever come up the coast in such a way. The general human population has nothing to worry about besides their everyday lives.

What goes on when they’re not looking can stay that way, a secret.

She pulls her feet up onto the rock’s edge even though the water is further than ever. Her back is staring to ache just a bit, and putting less strain on it seems to help. It seems like every hour she gets more and more used to the feeling of there being more than just flat, human skin across her back. She can barely feel them sitting like this, even. It’s her muscles that are struggling with the transition.

The pain yesterday was unlike anything she would feel again, she was certain. It was intense, burning, like someone was pulling her spine apart with both hands to create a big enough opening before they stuck one inside. It hadn’t been anything quick and immediate, either. It had been hours.

Would it be worth it? It had to be. The colony would have figured out how to stop it by now if it wasn’t worth it.

Kelsea is only alerted to how long they’ve been gone when her stomach starts to rumble. Rory pays no heed to it; he’s clambered off the rock and is now sitting in the sand, closer to where the water has now receded, but not doing much of anything. Occasionally he’ll reach forward to drag a hand through the water, but little happens.

She allows herself to wander, for a while. Rory looks after her when she goes but is quickly distracted by the water again. She sticks mostly to the rocks, clambering up and over and in wide circles before she peels back again to watch him, but he’s largely in the same position. The sun continues to sink. It’s not dark yet, but they’ve maybe an hour, two at most, before it is.

On her fourth go around Rory is up on his feet.

“We can go now,” he offers, without turning around.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” he confirms. “Might as well head out before it starts to get dark. And I can always come back.”

It’s just one walk away. He heads down here all the time, sometimes alone, sometimes trailing someone. The ocean isn’t going anywhere.

Neither is her family, but she has felt the urge for a while, and now she gets to follow it.

She’s going to see them.

—

—

—

The woods are thicker than Kelsea remembers them being.

It’s as if hundreds of years of growth have sprung up in her absence; she can’t find the hidden paths as easily as she could before, nor the places she would come so frequently before. It all looks different. It’s darker, more overbearing.

Less magical and instead foreboding.

Rory follows without complaint, though she can tell he’s finding it difficult to keep up with her, constantly stepping free from snagging vines and ivy, climbing over fallen trees wider than she is tall.

He says nothing.

The glamour is still in the same place as always, which allows her to feel the first reassuring thing in her bones that she could find since they stepped foot into the woods in the first place.

“Alright, stay here,” she starts.

“What?”

“It won’t let outsiders in. And it’s best that it doesn’t, anyway. No one would like you here.”

Everyone likes Rory. She has yet to meet a person that doesn’t. They wouldn’t so much dislike his personality as they would his entire presence, his species, his everything.

Rory sighs. “You won’t be long.”

“No. If it gets dark just go back to the house. I won’t be far behind you.”

Rory gives her a flat look. She points. “That way.”

At least she thinks, anyway. Kelsea has never gotten so turned around in the woods before. It really is all down to their intuition at this point, something she has never had to trust so deeply before.

“Be back soon,” she promises, turning for the glamour. Rory sits down with a thump on the nearest tree stump, taking up the classic position of guard duty. It’s not as if he’s guarding much, though. She sticks to what she said earlier, about him not being destructive. He wouldn’t do any harm, and he’s no sentry, either.

Entering through this shield is different than the one at the house, at home, but being on the other side of it is like re-discovering one of your favorite things from childhood, long forgotten about and lost for years. The sound here is different, more airy. Every breath in is cleaner, untouched by any of the outside world for as long as they’ve been here.

She can hear it too, in the distance. The soft musical chatter of others near and far, some getting closer with every passing step.

The clearing is still as beautiful as ever, the grass cast away away in favor of clean paths through the undergrowth. Not many are here, but the few that do turn to look at her, a sudden intruder into their perfect little world.

She looked like this, once. A part of the earth itself, moving as if even her insides were made of camouflage to hide her away from every danger.

She’s glad not to be hiding, anymore.

“Kelsea!”

The voice is shrill and high-pitched, and there’s a flurry of movement off to her left before someone flings themselves into her arms. Kelsea barely manages to keep them both upright as arms tangle around the small of her back, squeezing.

“I missed you,” Ada continues, muffled into her shoulder. “I thought you would come back to visit.”

One of her best friends in the world is trying to squeeze the life out of her and Kelsea can’t think of anything good to say. Did she ever promise that to anyone? Kelsea doesn’t even remember talking to Ada on that final day before she left. Before she never came back.

But she’s back now, isn’t she? That has to count for something.

“Sorry. Been a bit busy. I missed you too.”

That’s the truth, at least. Ada won’t be able to say anything against that to disprove it.

Ada squeezes her again. Neither of them are used to it or prepare for it in the slightest; she forgot, and Ada had no idea. When her hands drift over Kelsea’s back and press in she can  _ feel  _ it, shoulders going stiff in response.

“Kelsea,” she says quietly.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what you think it is.”

“That’s not supposed to happen for—”

“A long, long time, I know. Is anyone at my house?”

“Your mom, I think,” Ada guesses. “But Kelsea, this is—”

“C’mon,” she interrupts, pulling Ada along with her. It actually takes some force. Ada isn’t fighting her, exactly, but she’s not being overwhelmingly cooperative either. Her eyes are wide, posture stiff, only agreeable because Kelsea won’t let go of her.

She only does when she gets within sight of the house tucked away into the trees, though Ada follows her right to the front door as if her curiosity had gotten the best of her and then through it when Kelsea doesn’t even bother knocking.

This is still her house, technically.

“Mom?” she calls. There’s bustling from the other room and then her mother leans around the corner, eyes just as wide as Ada’s. Her face though is still the same, warm and kind and the definition of home.

“Kelsea?”

“Hey,” she says with a smile. Her mother smothers her in a hug and she waits patiently while she shakes them both back and forth a little until the realization settles in. If Ada could feel it, she could too. When she does she pulls back, holding onto Kelsea’s shoulders so tightly it begins to hurt.

“That’s why I’m here,” she says first. “I want to figure it out, too.”

Her mother turns her, feeling along the back of her shirt again before she finally gives in and pulls it up, to expose the wings neatly nestled against her back between her shoulders. Kelsea wishes she could see them better herself.

“That’s… that’s not supposed to happen,” she breathes quietly. Ada lets out a very large breath.

“I know, I know,” she insists. “But it did, yesterday. Nobody ever mentioned anything to me about it happening this early, not even an individual case. Unless it just wasn’t mentioned?”

“No, no. It doesn’t happen.” Her mother looks startled, her hand clutching the end of Kelsea’s shirt with shaky hands.

They’re both gawking like they never plan to stop. Kelsea finally takes half a pace forward until her mother’s hand falls away. Her shirt falls back to her waist.

“Why did you come?” she asks.

“I thought someone might know?” she wonders. “Was I wrong?”

“Ada, will you go get some of the elders?” her mother asks. Ada’s gaze darts between them before she nods and then flees out the front door as if she was never here at all. It feels like something is wrong, when it shouldn’t be. Nothing is inherently  _ wrong. _

Her mother reaches forward again, and then drops her hand just as quick.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“It doesn’t happen,” she repeats once again. “Not unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Sometimes, in the unseelie,” she offers. “Even then not very often. The dark magic in their bloodlines can cause early mutations.”

“Mutations,” she says flatly. “This isn’t a mutation, though. This is supposed to happen.”

“It’s not,” she murmurs. She takes a pace around Kelsea to look out the window and then back again.

So Kelsea is apparently a mutant. Got it. Not exactly what she was expecting to learn today, but at least it’s something. It’s just wings and a few powers - that wasn’t supposed to be a big deal when she would get them one day anyway.

There aren’t even any unseelie around here, either. None in the entire state, she doesn’t think. They’ve mostly taken up on the west coast, where both of the proper courts are. Besides, they’re not properly seelies here, either. Seelies work with humans, can live amongst them. All they do is hide and run and keep repeating the cycle.

What does her mother really know?

“It’s not just the mutation,” she announces, the word leaving a sour taste in her mouth. “I have the abilities, too.”

Her mother freezes. Kelsea isn’t even sure what she was going to do, but apparently nothing is as important as the words that just came out of her mouth. She turns, almost comically slow. It is sort of funny, Kelsea thinks.

“That’s not possible,” she insists.

“It is,” she fires back. “I’ll show you.”

Kelsea turns for the door only to find someone standing in her way. Ada is nowhere in sight, but she seems to have found one elder on her way to the others. At least it’s Aspen, in the very least. He’s always been kind to her, upwards of nine hundred years old and starting to look it, too. He could still kill her with a flick of his wrist.

“How long has it been, child?”

“A while,” she informs him. He does not smile.

Maybe he’s not so kind. It’s more likely that Kelsea was just an idiot.

“She has everything,” her mother says. “The wings and the abilities. Or so she says.”

“I’ll show you!” Kelsea says again. “If you’d just let me, then—”

Aspen holds a hand up before she’s even taken a single step. “So you’re dark, then?”

“What?” she asks. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

“If it’s happened like that, then you’ve gone dark. Or you’ve been dark this whole time.”

“People don’t just  _ go dark _ ,” she says.

“And what about the people you’ve been living with?”

“What about them?”

Aspen blinks at her patiently. Her mother, behind her, doesn’t seem nearly as inclined to wait. Kelsea lets that ruminate for a while, but she doesn’t have long. People are beginning to realize something is up - more and more of them are gathering inside.

“The people I live with,” she decides on, carefully. “Did not  _ make  _ me dark.”

“Then the last explanation is that you were born that way.”

“If I was born that way then who do you have to blame?” she asks wildly. It doesn’t feel like the appropriate time to bring up Shirin or anything he may have accidentally done to her. “If I am, then it came from  _ her _ ! Her, or my father! Why aren’t we blaming them?”

“You’re the only one like this, sweetheart,” her mother says gently. It’s not as gentle as anything ever was before all of this.

“Then I’ll leave,” she snaps. “You won’t have to deal with me.”

She says it, but makes no progress. Aspen is still standing, framed eerily in the doorway, in her path. Despite her bravado she’ll still feel bad if she has to shove past him, or worse.

She doesn’t want it to be anything worse.

“If you unleash yourself upon this world, terrible things will happen,” he says. “To you, and the people around you. Bad things will happen. Not everyone will survive it. You’re not willing to find out who the casualties will be.”

“Oh, I am,” she insists. “Because I’m  _ leaving. _ ”

“You can’t, sweetheart,” her mother says. “It’s not safe.”

It’s already not safe out there. Her mother doesn’t know that because she never leaves this little safe haven they’ve created and likely never will. If the world isn’t safe then Kelsea has no reason to be, either.

If that’s the case, then she wants to be dangerous. Unleashing herself isn’t close to the worst thing that happen, and she knows that because she’s experienced some of them already.

“You won’t be able to control it,” Aspen says. “Through no fault of your own. You already left once. Now you come back thinking the best and you bring someone else with you. The control has been gone for a long time.”

“She brought someone else with her?” her mother asks, concerned.

“He’s outside!” It didn’t happen very often, but Kelsea could feel her temper wearing thin. It was ought to snap any minute now.

“In sight of us.”

“And not coming any closer,” she says. Her voice sounds angrier than she’d like it to, on an ideal day.

It’s finally time to admit that this isn’t one of those days.

“That’s correct,” Aspen agrees. “He isn’t.”

Aspen isn’t the only one that knows he’s here. There’s a reason Ada hasn’t sent anyone back to the house just yet; the colony isn’t big enough that she hasn’t scoured the entire area yet looking for more than one of them. If Ada hasn’t tracked them that means they aren’t here to be found.

And if they’re not here to be found…

“If you touch him,” she starts.

“What will happen?”

“If you touch him, it won’t end well,” she repeats firmly. “And you won’t be quick enough to figure out if that’s a threat from my end or his.”

There is one massive advantage, it turns out, to not waiting until elderhood to gain all of the abilities you could ever want. To being a  _ mutant. _

Kelsea waits one more second, watching Aspen’s unmoving gaze, and then leaves.

It’s not pretty.

Getting around him isn’t an option, but tackling him is. Kelsea has never actually properly done that before. She bowls into him, lands half on top of him when he falls, and then rolls into the grass as far as she can with the gained momentum.

And then she’s running. When she glances behind her Aspen still hasn’t managed to pick himself back up.

It must suck, getting old. It’s a good thing she’s not going to.

Kelsea makes a direct beeline for the exact place she stepped in, but when she stumbles out past the boundary the tree stump Rory had been sitting on top of is glaringly empty. There are voices coming from the east - loud, shouting voices, right from the direction of the river.

It wasn’t even a conscious thought to leave Rory this close to it, but that’s what she did. Just like she doesn’t believe it was one for him to go there, either.

But that’s what they both dead.

There’s no catching sight of anyone in the thick of the forest; Kelsea sees the river, first, slightly swollen from last night’s rain, and saves herself from tripping down the hill and onto its banks. There are people down there, unrecognizable green blurs from the colony, but no Rory.

The water is moving against the current, though. It’s desperately pushing back against its natural direction of travel.

Kelsea follows it. She follows water like it means something.

It probably does.

There are more of them the further she goes. This has to be almost all of them. The numbers of their little group are hardly enough to sustain a search this wide for one person.

Shouts erupt from behind her. Right, make that two people. Aspen, at this point, most likely wants her dead. He’ll either do that or him and the other elders will drag her back kicking and screaming like some evil, petulant child.

The water stops fifty yards upstream and is swirling, gushing over the banks and tearing away at the soil. It’s stopping any of the colony from making more progress.

She still can’t see him, but she takes her chances.

Kelsea buries her hands in the dirt at her feet and  _ shoves _ , both with her hands and her mind. The crumble of dirt is hardly anything, at first, and then the hillside begins to give way beneath her feet. She scoots back as far as she can manage, dragging her hands along the ground.

“Rory!” she shouts. It’s worth the risk, as half the hill breaks free from the rest of the earth and plunges towards the river. The water was stopping them and now the earth is, too, creating a blockage that they’ll have to take time to navigate around.

The shouting behind her grows louder. She flings herself over the fissure she’s created and starts down the hill on the other side of it. He has to be down there, and she definitely  _ can’t  _ be up here. There’s too many people coming after her.

She just has to find him.

Or he has to find her, turns out.

He slams into her out of nowhere, nothing but brush to her right one second and then him, miraculously. He’s drenched from head to toe.

“What the hell?” he asks breathlessly, panting. He was unhurt, though, or at least untouched. It looks like he may have taken a bit of a beating in the river in order to get it to cooperate.

There’s no time to get it all out. “We have to go.”

“Where?”

“Back to the house!” she insists, shoving him in that vague direction. “We need to go fast, or we need help. We need  _ something _ .”

“I called Vance by mistake. I told them we needed help.”

“You assumed that?”

“I was getting  _ chased! _ ” he reminds her, hardly able to get the words out in-between pants as they run.

“Are they coming?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you not know?” she asks wildly.

“I dropped it in the river, okay, I panicked!” he yells. “Oh, God, we’re going to die aren’t we?”

Maybe. Probably. Hopefully not.

Truth be told, Kelsea doesn’t have the faintest clue.

They’re running for what seems like forever. Luckily the elders aren’t able to take flight in woods so densely packed or they would certainly be screwed by now. It could be forever, for all she knows, but the shouting never lets up. It’s failing to be about Rory’s presence more and more with every step - they want her.

It occurs to her to stop and turn around. To stop  _ them _ .

She doesn’t. Rory won’t leave her, and they’ll have no issue killing him. Maybe this entire colony has been more unseelie than not all along and no one’s ever realized. It would explain her, in the very least.

Kelsea stops looking behind her after several long minutes of running and focuses on her breathing, growing harsher with every passing minute. Rory’s only keeping up with her because his legs are so much longer. She feels like she would have lost him by now if it.

It’s too long, much too long, but eventually the light up ahead intensifies. They’re almost there, to the clear open space of the meadow and the house beyond it. Kelsea has never been so glad to be this close it.

She bursts out of the treeline into the tall grass and nearly trips on nothing at all once nothing is in her direct path.

It’s that, and she realizes there’s a car parked just in front of the house, headlights still gleaming.

If she’s being honest, that’s the real reason.

It appears they came after all.

Vance takes one look at them, even from across the meadow, grabs Rooke, and shoves him towards the front door of the house. There are two other people in the car, she thinks, vague shadows she can’t make out. Vance makes the same gesture at the two of them, that much is clear.

He’s still waiting for them at the door when Kelsea finally throws herself up the stairs and across the porch. Once again she trips on nothing, but this time she actually fails, and faceplants right at Vance’s feet. At least she’s  _ inside.  _

Rooke pulls her back to her feet, clammy hands and all, and Rory is saved from falling right on top of her by Vance as he slams the door shut.

“What the fuck are you two doing?” he asks incredulously. “Did you fall in the river?”

“A little bit,” Rory admits. “What do we do?”

He’s talking to her, she realizes. Kelsea brushes aside the curtains next to the door to peer out - the woods right at the fringe seem to be moving, coming alive with dozens of bodies about to come pouring out.

“The shield will keep them out, right?” he continues, voice hopeful.

“Not in the slightest.” They invented such things, the glamour that keeps their homes safe deep in the woods. One here won’t stop them for more than a few seconds. “We need to hide. Upstairs. At least that way we can get out.”

All of them are looking at her strangely. None of them until now had considered that they may  _ need  _ o get out.

Kelsea doesn’t think anyone out there will step foot in this house but she also doesn’t think there’s a chance in hell they’re leaving.

“Upstairs,” she repeats. Vance looks completely mind-blogged at the turn of events, even as she turns to the stairs.

And there are the two other people in the car. Right, she forgot about them.

“That’s Farren,” Vance says, clearly exhausted. Farren waves at her. “And that’s uh, Casper, you know—”

“The voice in his head,” Casper says cheerily. “I exist!”

Kelsea blinks. That’s a development.

Apparently they’ve all been having plenty of those.

“What the  _ fuck _ ?” Rory breathes. He’s finally turned towards the stairs too, clearly listening because he’s good at it like she said, but now his eyes are stuck on Casper, as wide as can be. “You’re—”

“Casper,” he confirms. “He just told you that.”

“No, you’re, what the  _ fuck _ ,” Rory repeats. “We found you, me and Celia. In August. You were the guy in the car.”

“What?” Casper asks, eyebrows knitting together. Farren murmurs the same thing but at least manages to look less confused about the whole thing.

“Upstairs,” she insists, shoving Rory up the first two. He listens, at first, but there are things spilling out of his mouth under his breath that don’t make sense at all, something again about a car and a body and Kelsea has no time to figure it out. Neither does Casper, apparently, or maybe he just has little idea how to.

Kelsea reaches back to grab Vance before she heads upstairs after everyone else. His eyes are fixated on the window - the trees are no longer just alive, they’re producing people, members of the colony spilling out into the meadow following their trail.

She yanks him up the first few stairs and watches him clutch at his chest. “Are you okay?”

“Don’t you dare deflect,” he snaps. “What the hell is going on out there right now?”

Something happened to him while she was daring to be happy with everything she was discovered.

“A lot,” she says, by way of explanation. “I’m sorry.”

Vance doesn’t let up. It’s not like him. “ _ Tell me.” _

“Remember what I told you about what would happen to me when I got older?”

He nods. She grabs his arm again and drags his hand around to her back, planting it squarely between her shoulder blades. For once, there’s no pain associated with the action. Vance’s eyes widen to the size of saucers.

“That’s your family out there,” he reminds her, as if she needs it. “Why are they chasing you then?”

“They think something’s wrong with me.”

He doesn’t even wait for her to finish the sentence. “There isn’t.”

She knew that, she felt it, but hearing someone else say it is almost enough to make her collapse and crumble. There can’t be anything wrong with her. She doesn’t want to hurt people, she never has. She just wants to live the life she’s always wanted.

“Thank you,” she whispers. He nods, reaching around to squeeze her shoulders.

“You’re good,” he assures. “As long as you’re okay.”

“I’m okay.”

“So how do we get rid of them?”

“Hopefully fast,” Rooke says quietly, fiddling with Vance’s phone. “Celia and Tanis are at the road. They stopped because they heard the noise.”

“They need to stay there.”

“You think Celia’s going to listen?”

“Tell her I’m fine,” Rory insists. “She’ll listen.”

He’s not fine, though. He definitely doesn’t look it. Everything about him is shaken and unsure. All of the things they felt in the past twenty-four hours are gone now, replaced by the dread and horror of being hunted and outcasted. 

Kelsea leans around the corner, getting another look at the door. They haven’t come close enough to see, yet. She doesn’t think they will.

That doesn’t mean they’re going anywhere.

“They’re not going to leave,” she murmurs. Only Vance hears her.

“So what do we do?”

There’s nothing Vance  _ can  _ do. These are the same people who would have left him for dead in the middle of the woods, mangled and freshly bitten. If she hadn’t found him, no one would have done anything. They would have killed Rory, if she had caught them. Not one of the elders has ever lifted a finger to stop any of the horrific things going on around them unless it had a direct effect.

Rooke died a long time ago, and in an even lesser span apparently Casper did, too.

All they’re doing is making it worse.

“You need to stay here,” she says finally. “Please.”

She’s not sure it’s everyone, but it’s close. There’s a resounding chime-in of  _ no  _ that echoes around the hall, even one that comes from Farren’s end. She can’t act as if she didn’t hear it.

“You’re not going back,” Rory says.

“No.”

“Then what are you doing to do?”

She takes a deep breath. “Make them leave.”

“You don’t know you can do that.”

“Yes I can,” she decides. She has to believe in at least one thing right now. “But you’re all going to stay here. Promise me.”

No one does. She didn’t expect them to. If this goes sideways at least half of them will be out the door after her regardless of what she asks. They won’t let her go, or worse, just like that. There’s no way.

Kelsea pulls her arm from Vance’s grip and miraculously, he lets go.

No one has promised yet, but she heads back down the stairs anyway.

She can feel them all staring at her as she opens the front door - asking them not to wouldn’t be fair, if she’s already making them stay upstairs.

Kelsea can’t even pin-point an exact number of people that have spread themselves out thin around the house, but there’s not that many of them. The issue with the colony isolating themselves was that they never had the population that other groups did. They were intimidating, sure, but Kelsea had known these people all her life. She wasn’t going to be scared of them even if she had just spent time running from them.

This was her home, her life, her people. Nobody was taking that away from her.

She doesn’t go looking about for faces she can recognize. Her mother and father are in their somewhere, her siblings. Even Aspen must be cowering behind someone, because she can’t catch sight of him.

Kelsea doesn’t leave the drive. “If I ask you nicely, will you leave?”

No one moves. It was sort of a joke, but she doesn’t think it was appropriately appreciated the way it should have been.

“You heard what the solution is.”

There’s Aspen. He wasn’t cowering, exactly, but he had been behind two people much larger than himself, broader in the shoulders until he steps out to face her. When she was younger he was intimidating. 

He isn’t anymore. It’s like realizing someone you idolized so much is actually nothing at all.

“And what if I don’t like the solution?” she asks.

“It’s no longer a discussion of your personal enjoyment on the subject. You—”

“Have no obligation to listen to you or do anything you say. That’s just what you’ve all been telling yourselves for years - you talk, we listen. The fact that someone isn’t is driving you insane.”

“Your disregard for safety is, as you say it, driving me insane.”

“And I’ll be safe with you?” she dares to wonder. “With people who think I’m nothing more than a mutation?”

“It’s the truth. We can’t make you like what you hear.”

“I’m not going with you,” she informs him. “So you leave, or I’ll keep good on my promise.”

He stares, unblinking. She steps off the asphalt into the grass and there’s almost a physical feeling as she connects directly with the earth once again. It’s like they’re one, her and what’s beneath her feet. It listens to her and she allows it to be.

Except for now. It might have to do something for her.

“You don’t want to hurt anyone,” he says. No, he  _ knows _ . Aspen is right. Kelsea has never wanted to hurt anyone.

She doesn’t now, either.

“I don’t,” she agrees. “But you’re going more than six feet under if you don’t leave.”

There’s a shift at that, concealed nerves that most of the colony is managing to hide. If she could see the faces of anyone that matters it would be a different story.

Kelsea digs her foot into the ground, scraping her shoe back and forth until it sinks in. It listens to her, now, the way it’s always listened to all of them. It just took until now for it to happen.

It’s a tremble again, even fainter than the one she caused last night, but it’s building. It almost feels like nothing to her, but distantly she can hear things clattering about in the house, threatening to pitch over and fall.

She could split this whole place open if she wanted to.

“I’ve made my decision,” she announces. “What about yours?”

He’ll be the first. She can see exactly where the split would occur, right out from the point of her foot, thirty feet away. A hole will open up. Aspen will disappear and never come back out. Not even his own powers would be enough to save him.

“If you destroy this place, it will be on no one’s conscious but your own,” Aspen says.

She shrugs. “Sure will.”

It has yet to stop. Everyone’s realized that. The conversation can continue but she won’t stop until there is absolute guaranteed certainty that she is in no danger, that everyone back in the house is safe.

At the end of the day, this is her doing.

Aspen looks less than pleased, perhaps at her last words, but he nods sharply. The two men behind him step out of the way as if anticipating his path and sure enough, he turns to go. The meaning is clear. If Aspen goes, they all go.

Kelsea fixes her eyes towards the tree-tops, avoiding the looks. It doesn’t matter who’s giving them because she doesn’t want to. After a minute, the last of the colony disappears into the trees. Something in the woods seems to die as they retreat, as the separation finalizes.

She shuffles back to the drive without looking, until there’s nothing but cement under her feet once again. The shaking subsides and then stops.

The door creaks open. She still can’t look away.

“Tell them it’s safe to come up,” she invites.

“Is it?” Rory asks. She wasn’t expecting him - almost anyone else, really. It seems fitting, though. They were in this together. She almost got him killed bringing him so close.

Despite that, it makes sense that he’s the first one out.

He knows what he could have done, too.

It was her thing to finish from the get-go. She never could have predicted what would have happened just by asking simple questions from people who should have had her back no matter what. They never truly had her best interests in mind.

She just had to find the people that did.

“It is,” she promises. “It’s safe.”

—

—

—

Kelsea doesn’t even make it back to the porch before there are headlights coming towards her.

She only moves in the first place because it looks as if Rory’s about to come out after her, and then Vance. Neither of them have to.

She’s more than capable.

It’s the bike first. She expected that, anticipated it.

But there’s a car on its tail end, following it up to the house.

She wasn’t prepared for that just yet.

Rory’s had the phone this whole while, or at least he did until it got forever lost to the river. She hasn’t seen any of the updates first hand, and to be honest, she was a little preoccupied to ask for them. Frankly, not knowing was better. She couldn’t stew and worry about all of the way things could go wrong if she pretended it wasn’t happening at all.

But now they’re back. Dimara’s face behind the wheel doesn’t exactly  _ look  _ all doom and gloom.

“I’m not even sure I like babies,” Vance decides, too little too late.

Because they’ve got one now.

Celia is the first one on solid ground, leaving Tanis to rock back and forth on the bike trying to keep it steady. Kelsea quickly skirts around her as she goes for Rory, unwilling to get too involved in the conversation. Like she said, she didn’t have the phone. It’s not her fault.

Well, at least the predictable lack of communication out.

Tanis beats her to the car, even though she tries. Dimara and Kali are both out by the time she gets there. She watches Blair get out with a bit in her stomach. If something went terribly wrong they’d know, surely.

She just can’t read his face.

Tanis circles around him to look into the car. “What the  _ fuck _ ?” she emphasizes.

Kelsea tries to follow. Dimara grabs her arm.

“What the hell did you two do?” she asks firmly, looking Kelsea over. She hadn’t realized until now that she looks like a certified trainwreck, streaked with dirt and mud. Her palms are scraped open where she fell and studded with rock.

“Um,” she tries. “Nothing?”

“Nothing too bad,” Rory calls. Celia smacks him in the arm.

Ideally she just wants out of this, for now. There will be time for explaining later. For now she wants this moment and to properly understand the look on Blair’s face once and for all.

Dimara lets go, but Vance still beats her there. He blinks, leans in, and then takes a step back.

“I don’t mean to raise any alarm,” he says. “But there are two of them.”

“Really?” Nadir asks. “I had no idea.”

Hearing her voice sends a flood of relief through Kelsea like none other, but the previous words have an opposite effect. She can only  _ imagine  _ the look on her face as totally priceless - Celia and Rory both whirl around, and Rooke’s eyes nearly fall out of his head.

Even Farren and Casper have the decency to look alarmed.

Kelsea lurches around the door and pauses, searching for the awful. There isn’t any. Nadir looks… haggard, to put it kindly. She looks like she’s never slept through the night in her entire life, something she must have acquired from Blair.

But she’s here, and she looks fine, and there are two of them.

There are… two babies.

“Fuck me,” Tanis says flatly. “You’re really telling me you didn’t steal someone else’s baby.”

Kelsea’s not sure what to do on this front. To be fair, she wasn’t sure about this, ever, and now everyone else looks the same way. They could never officially go to the doctor because of how badly everything got messed up, and now…

She looks at Blair. He looks like he’s been at war for ten plus years, thousand yard stare and all.

Vance waves a hand in front of his face. “You alive in there?”

“Very much,” he responds, though his voice sounds unsure. “I think I asked one of the nurses if we could return one of them.”

“You did,” Dimara chips in. He gives her the finger, though it looks very much robotic.

“You’re lucky I can’t remember which one of them you asked about, or they’d know that the second they were old enough to,” Nadir informs him. “Can someone please get me out of here.”

Tanis offers her arms, and so does Vance, and between the three of them they get her out of the car. She looks fine, really, just slightly unsure of herself and beyond exhausted as Kelsea already pointed out.

And there are still two of them.

As soon as they’re gone Kelsea takes Nadir’s place in the back-seat, leaning over the swaddled little bundles. Both seem to be sleeping peacefully, hardly moving.

Blair leans over her, sighing. “Jesus Christ.”

“Oh, they’re so cute though,” she croons. “C’mon, look at them.”

“I’m having difficulty looking away.”

He doesn’t just sound unsure, he sounds blatantly terrified. Kelsea can understand why, now. Blair had his head wrapped around one of them, finally, after five months, but two? And with absolutely zero warning?

Kelsea is having difficulty understanding it herself.

“Hey, we got this,” she says, craning her head back to look at him. “We can do this.”

“Yeah. Shit.”

“We can do this,” she repeats. “I always did like the number eleven better anyway.”

Maybe even twelve, with Kali. Farren and Casper are here now, too. Who’s to say that they weren’t supposed to end up at thirteen? It seems a fitting enough number for the lot of them. Thirteen of them for the thirteenth of April.

On a Friday, no less. These kids are destined for greatness.

Kelsea leans back over them again. “Just so you’re aware, I love you both already more than I love myself.”

“Dramatic,” Blair comments.

“But very true!”

He sighs again. Without turning she hears an odd noise, almost as if he’s banging his forehead off the top of the car. “I relate to that too.”

Of course he does. She’s not surprised by that at all. Blair may act a lot of different ways but he wouldn’t fool anyone on that front.

In the thick of things, Kelsea has almost managed to forget about what just happened before. She’s allowed herself to because she made her choice and there will never be going back on it. Looking at the two of them, she wouldn’t want to. This is where she’s meant to be, and she knows it. It feels like it was always meant to be this way.

And Kelsea is different now. Maybe there are people out there who think it’s a bad sort of different, that she’ll do awful things and care very little for who she hurts, but it’s not like that.

She can hold her own. She can  _ protect them.  _

Isn’t that all that matters?

There is plenty to tell the others but it can wait for now. The world may be ending in gradual stages, but it can postpone itself for just a minute. Everything, for the time being, is fine just the way it is.

That’s what she’ll continue telling herself. A tree is down in the meadow and her family is long gone, but everything will be fine.

“Everything is going to be fine,” she murmurs, quietly enough that it feels like the words are meant just for them. Blair may be able to hear her, as always, but it’s number ten and number eleven that need them the most.

They need to know that everything’s going to be okay.

And Kelsea knows it is.

She’s going to make sure of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole thing will be done by the end of February at the very latest, luckily for us all. The end is near!


End file.
